HONDURAN police have made their first arrest over the murder of indigenous people’s campaigner Berta Caceres, they said on Thursday night.

The co-founder of the Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPIHN) was killed at about 1am on Thursday morning at her home in La Esperanza in the western province of Intibuca.

At least two gunmen broke into her home and shot her four times. Fellow campaigner Gustavo Castro, a Mexican who is director of campaign group Otros Mundos Chiapas, was wounded in the attack.

Ms Caceres campaigned for the rights of Honduras’s indigenous Lenca people and the mixed-race Garifuna ethnic group.

She won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in halting the construction of a dam on the River Gualcarque that would have damaged the Lencas’ ancestral land.

Recently she had received death threats from police, soldiers and local landowners because of her work.

Honduran President Juan Hernandez said: “This act has caused mourning among all Hondurans.”

He added that the authorities were working in “co-ordination with the support of the United States and other countries to find the culprits.”

But friends and colleagues of Ms Caceres blamed the government for the assassination.

Dozens protested outside the mortuary where her autopsy was being carried out, carrying banners reading: “No more impunity.”

Cuban-trained doctor Luther Castillo said that the Garifuna people strongly condemned the “vile murder of our sister Berta Cacaeres.”

Dr Castillo called the killing “another demonstration of the cowardice of the Honduran state — murdering those who defend with body and soul the rights of the most excluded of this nation.

“The Honduran state is an assassin state, where there is no justice for the poor, the black and the indigenous,” he said.

“So they will have to kill all of us,” Dr Castillo tearfully exclaimed.

Condemnation also came from the European Union and the US, where Democratic Party Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison said: “Berta knew her life was in danger and she fought anyway.”

Mr Ellison called on Mr Hernandez to co-ordinate a thorough international investigation.

“The Honduran government must protect people like Berta, who risk their lives fighting for justice every day,” he said.