CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan authorities on Sunday finished evacuating inmates from a prison where the government said 58 people were killed in one of the deadliest prison clashes in the nation’s history.

More than two days after the bloodshed, Penitentiary Service Minister Iris Varela released an official death toll and said 46 wounded victims remained hospitalized.

She said the evacuation of Uribana prison in the city of Barquisimeto was completed Sunday morning. Inmates were loaded aboard buses and driven to other prisons.

Those killed in the fierce gun battles, which pitted armed inmates against National Guard troops, included inmates as well as two Protestant pastors and one soldier, she said. One victim’s body was burned, Varela said.

Dr. Ruy Medina, director of Central Hospital in the city, said Saturday that the death toll had risen to 61, while about 120 were wounded in the violence.

Medina said nearly all of the injuries were from gunshots and 45 of the estimated 120 people who were wounded remained hospitalized. The differing death tolls could not be immediately explained.

Relatives wept outside the prison during the violence and cried at the morgue as they waited to identify bodies.

The riot was the latest in a series of deadly clashes in Venezuela’s overcrowded prisons, where inmates typically obtain weapons and drugs with the help of corrupt guards. Critics called it proof that the government is failing to get a grip on a worsening national crisis in its penitentiaries.

The gun battles seized attention amid uncertainty about President Hugo Chavez’s future, while he remained in Cuba recovering and undergoing treatment more than six weeks after his latest cancer surgery.

Government officials pledged a thorough investigation, while some critics said there should have been ways for the authorities to prevent such bloodshed.

The riot was the deadliest in nearly two decades. In January 1994, more than 100 inmates died in the country’s bloodiest prison violence on record when a riot and fire set by inmates tore through a prison in the western city of Maracaibo. In 1992, about 60 inmates were killed in a riot in a Caracas prison.

Varela said that the violence began Friday when groups of inmates attacked National Guard troops who were attempting to carry out an inspection. She said the government decided to send troops to search the prison after reports of clashes between groups of inmates during the past two days.

Information for this article was contributed by Vivian Sequera and Jorge Rueda of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 01/28/2013