TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras, March 4 (Reuters) - A top Honduran police commander and his bodyguard were killed by gunmen thought to be linked to drug traffickers smuggling cocaine along the country's isolated Atlantic coast, authorities said on Sunday.

Operations chief Rigoberto Aceituno, Honduras' fourth highest-ranking policeman, was killed outside his home in the capital on Saturday night when gunmen open fired from a car, said Security Ministry spokesman Miguel Martinez.

Martinez said the attack was thought to be the work of a gang shipping South American cocaine toward the United States along Honduras' Atlantic coast, much of which is a near impenetrable area of jungles, river deltas and swamps.

Aceituno, who was until recently chief of police for the Atlantic region of Colon, was the most senior member of Honduras' police force to be killed in years.

Central America, with its long, largely unpoliced Atlantic and Pacific coasts, has become a major trans-shipment point for drugs on their way to the United States.

While Honduras' neighbor Guatemala is embroiled in a drug scandal that has seen senior policemen and lawmakers murdered in recent weeks, Central America has so far largely escaped the wide-scale violence associated with international drug-trafficking that has plagued Mexico and Colombia.

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