A fight at El Castillo prison in Mazatlan kills nine inmates and a visitor

Nine inmates and a family visitor were killed on Thursday in a fight at the El Castillo penitentiary in Mazatlan, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Sixteen other inmates were injured and taken for medical treatment. The state public security secretariat said the prison was later under control, with an inter-institutional group of security forces still on the site. Visits have been suspended.

Sinaloa's secretary of public security, Sinuhe Tellez, said in a video that the visitor who died was a minor. Social-work staff are contacting the families of the dead. Tellez said the rest of the prison population was safe, and that the suspension of visits was a precaution for inmates, staff and families who would have come that day. The state attorney general's office has been notified and will investigate how the fight started and who is responsible.

The secretariat's own account, posted on Thursday and dated 8 October, is short. The directorate of El Castillo reported a fight inside the facilities. Nine persons deprived of liberty died. One family visitor died. Sixteen more inmates were injured and had already been moved for pre-hospital care. The inter-institutional group took over. Authorities remain. That is the whole official narrative. It does not name a weapon, a faction or a spark.

Sinaloa is in the middle of a war between wings of the Sinaloa cartel, the split that followed the arrest and the later captivity of the group's best-known figures. The US State Department tells Americans not to travel to Sinaloa and to five other Mexican states because of that violence. Officials in Mazatlan have not said the prison fight belongs to that conflict. A prison in this state does not have to be a cartel battlefield to be dangerous, and a cartel battlefield does not announce itself in the first secretariat note. The missing link is the point investigators have been told to establish.

The visitor's death is the fact that takes the event out of the category of an internal brawl. Family visits are how relatives bring in food, news and, in badly run prisons, goods the administration does not control. A minor killed on a visit means the fight reached the area where outsiders are let in, or that the visitor was already inside when it started. Tellez has confirmed the age category and not the age. The attorney general's inquiry is where a name and a time of entry would sit.

Mexican prisons have a long record of this kind of violence, often when two groups are held in the same block and the staff cannot keep them apart. El Castillo is the Mazatlan state prison, not a federal maximum-security centre. State facilities hold the mix of local sentences and remand prisoners that federal centres are built to avoid. Sixteen injured inmates transferred out is a load on Mazatlan hospitals as well as a prison incident. The secretariat said they had been moved. It did not name the hospitals.

By Thursday night the operational claims were these: the prison is under control, visits are off, families are being called, and the attorney general has the file. The death toll is 10, one of them a child visitor. Whether that toll is the last depends on the 16 injured. The secretariat has not reported a further death among them.