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Police in Paraguay are searching for six members of a criminal gang who broke out of prison through a hole in the ground.

The escapees belong to Brazil's largest criminal gang, First Command of the Capital (PCC), which has been expanding to neighbouring Paraguay.

It is not clear if the hole was dug by construction workers or the inmates themselves.

Three fugitives have so far been captured.

The jail break happened in the early hours of Tuesday morning in the city of Coronel Oviedo,

ABC said that the hole in the ground had been left after construction work had been carried out and that police had not been informed of the "improvement works".

But another Paraguayan newspaper, La Tribuna, reported that the hole and the tunnel leading from it had been dug by the inmates themselves.

Photos shared on social media by journalist Anibal Emery showed a pair of flip-flops abandoned next to the hole.

The hole led from the prison's washroom to a tunnel which emerged in the exercise yard. From there, the prisoners only had to jump over a fence to reach freedom.

Paraguay's justice minister told local radio that "clearly there was negligence on the part of the prison authorities because a tunnel like this isn't built overnight".

All of the escapees are considered extremely dangerous, police said. They are serving lengthy sentences for crimes ranging from kidnapping to murder. The youngest escapee is 19 and the oldest 40, police said.

The PCC is a powerful gang which has its power base in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Its jailed members control prisons across Brazil and in Paraguay.

Gang members on the outside, meanwhile, smuggle drugs internationally to locations as far away as Europe and engage in large-scale bank robberies.

This is not the first mass PCC jail break in Paraguay in recent years.

In 2020, 75 inmates escaped from a prison in the eastern city of Pedro Juan Caballero.