"Baltimore happens to be about the worst case," Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post.

"If you look at it statistically, it's like, the number of shootings, the number of crimes, the number of everything - this morning I heard a statistic, Baltimore is worse than Honduras, okay?"

Trump provoked accusations of racism when he lashed out at the majority black, Democratic-led city on Sunday by attacking prominent African-American lawmaker Elijah Cummings, whose district covers much of Baltimore.

According to FBI data from 2017, the latest full-year figures available, Baltimore had a per capita murder rate of 55.8 per 100,000 population, which was less than that of St Louis, Missouri.

Baltimore, near Washington, has slightly more than 600,000 residents.

Honduras, a country of more than nine million, registered 41.2 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018, with one of its cities, San Pedro Sula, named as among the world's most violent cities in a report last November by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

San Pedro Sula had a murder rate of more than 80 per 100,000, the report said.