GUATEMALA CITY – A Guatemalan police officer accused of extortion was killed early Monday by angry residents of an Indian community in western Guatemala, authorities said.

A spokesman for the PNC national police force told Efe that the lynching occurred during the wee hours in San Martin Jilotepeque, at some 65 kilometers (40 miles) west of Guatemala City.

“The agent was Miguel Angel Curruchiche Gonzalez, 36, who Sunday night was caught by a mob of locals who accused him of shaking down a (bus) driver,” the spokesman said.

Curruchiche was disarmed and tied to a post, and for several hours was beaten and tortured “until he was soaked with gasoline and burned alive before dawn on Monday,” according to the spokesman.

Some PNC cops who tried to rescue their fellow-officer ware held for more than three hours by the enraged locals, who threatened to kill them if they insisted on freeing Curruchiche.

The PNC said that the agent who was lynched, a 15-year police veteran, had no criminal record nor charges against him.

Guatemala has experienced more than 300 fatal lynchings since 1996 and human rights activists documented upwards of 100 instances of vigilante justice in the country last year.

More than 100 lynchings occurred in the Central American nation through Sept. 30, leading to 28 deaths, according to the Mutual Support Group, or GAM, a human rights organization.

The comparable figures for the first nine months of 2008 were 94 and six, respectively, GAM director Mario Polanco said last month, blaming the increase in lynchings on “desperation” over the failure of Guatemala’s institutions to “provide security and impart justice.”

The more than 5,400 homicides reported last year in Guatemala – a nation of approximately 13 million – was nearly equal to the number of murders in neighboring Mexico, which has more than 100 million inhabitants and is the scene of open war among rival drug cartels. EFE