San Pedro Sula, Honduras ? Honduran gangs had killed before, leaving dismembered bodies and grisly messages in defiance of President Ricardo Maduro’s no-tolerance campaign against them.

But when gunmen shot up a bus Thursday night, leaving 22 adults and six children dead along with a promise of more violence, they raised the stakes in what increasingly looks like a war between authorities and Central America’s criminal underworld.

“These are people you can’t even call humans, they are animals,” Rosa Juarez said Friday, standing with dozens of people waiting to retrieve the bodies of loved ones at the morgue in San Pedro Sula, a coastal city 125 miles north of the capital, Tegucigalpa.

Juarez thought her cousin and two of the woman’s sons, who were out doing some last-minute Christmas shopping, were among those killed when suspected gang members fired assault rifles into the bus after blocking it in a poor community on the outskirts of town.

Bloodied bodies were found scattered over the muddy road. The driver was slumped dead over the steering wheel. His assistant also died. Fourteen passengers were hospitalized with wounds, and only 11 escaped unharmed or with light injuries in the worst attack in years in a country known for widespread lawlessness.

The morgue’s director, Francisco Herrera, said one family lost a 10-year-old girl and 6-year-old boy, while their mother and a 6-year-old sister were wounded.

“This is something that moves even those of us who are accustomed to seeing death,” Herrera said. “How sad it is that such things are putting Honduras’ name in the news, especially on a day like this.”

The gunmen left a message stuck to the bus windshield claiming they were part of an unknown revolutionary group opposed to reinstating the death penalty in Honduras, one of the main campaign issues in next year’s presidential campaign. Executions were stopped in the 1950s.

The message also included threats against the president of Congress, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, who is a death penalty supporter and one of four contenders for the ruling National Party’s presidential nomination.

Relatives of Josue Lopez cry over his coffin in their home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Assailants opened fire on a public bus late Thursday in northern Honduras, killing at least 28 passengers and wounding 16 others, police said.

Speaking to reporters at the morgue, Lobo Sosa said the attack reinforced his determination to revive the death penalty. “We should not yield an inch,” he said.

Human rights groups have criticized some aspects of the government’s crackdown on gangs, saying it has encouraged vigilantes and charging that many suspects are jailed just for having tattoos, which can be a gang symbol.

But with crime soaring and the ranks of gangs swelling, the public has shown little sympathy for those concerns. Stepping up the crackdown has become a major issue as presidential hopefuls begin campaigning to replace Maduro, whose term ends in January 2006.

Police spokesman Wilmer Torres said the note left in the bus attack promised more violence, saying “people should take advantage of this Christmas, because the next one will be worse.”