13 inmates killed in fresh fight in Ecuador prison

Thirteen inmates were killed and two others injured on Monday in yet another bloody fight in a notorious Ecuadorian prison, law enforcement officials said.

"Unfortunately, central command reports 13 (inmates) dead and two injured," the South American country's prison authority SNAI said on Twitter.

The incident took place at the same Bellavista prison in the town of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Quito, where 44 inmates were killed in a bloody brawl in May.

Prison officials, aided by the military and the police, were able to regain control of the facility, SNAI said.

Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo later told a press conference that current information indicated "most" of the victims were Venezuelan.

Local media reported that some prisoners were decapitated or dismembered during the fight.

Some 220 inmates escaped from the prison during the May riot, but most of them have been recaptured.

Vicious prison riots are common in prisons in Ecuador, where drug gangs are vying for control of trafficking routes.

Those rivalries sometimes explode into grisly violence behind bars, with some inmates hacked to death or beheaded with machetes.

Nestled between the world's biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has seen a surge of violence blamed on fighting between rival drug groups.