One hundred and ninety-four members of one of El Salvador's most notorious street gangs were rounded up by police last week, while they were attending a church vigil for four of their comrades who had been killed in a drive-by shooting on the previous day.

The parish priest, Br Domingo Solis, a Franciscan friar, protested when police special forces burst into the Reina de la Paz (Queen of Peace) church in Soyapango, near the capital, San Salvador, early on the morning of 12 July. The forces ignored the protest and arrested 194 members of Mara 18, one of two youth gangs blamed by the Government for most of the violent crimes in a country with the highest murder rate in Latin America. In 2005 there were 3,761 killings in El Salvador, whose population is under seven million. That compares with 833 murders in England and Wales in 2004.

Br Solis said he had reached a prior understanding with the police to allow the gang members and their families to attend the vigil, but the national police commissioner, Rodrigo Avila, told the priest that Salvadorean law permitted the police to enter a church in hot pursuit of suspects. The raid took place after a policeman was shot dead by a member of Mara 18, known as El Shaggy, in Soyapango on the previous evening.

There are at least 80,000 gang members in Central America, most of them in El Salvador and neighbouring Honduras. The two big organisations, Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha, originated on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, among the children of Central American immigrants. Many of them were deported to their parents' countries of origin. El Salvador's conservative President, Elias Antonio "Tony" Saca, has been pursuing a hard-line law-and-order policy against the maras.