Six Colombian inmates accused of killing a former presidential candidate in Ecuador were killed in a prison riot on Friday, authorities said. The incident took place in the Guayas 1 prison in Guayaquil, where a violent disturbance broke out among rival gangs.
The prison authority SNAI said in a statement that the six deceased were “of Colombian nationality and accused of the murder of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.” Villavicencio, a 59-year-old journalist, was shot dead as he left a campaign rally in Quito days before the first round of the election.
Ecuadoran President Guillermo Lasso, who was on a personal trip to New York, announced that he would cut short his visit and return to Ecuador to handle the emergency. He was scheduled to travel to Seoul on Saturday for official trade talks. “In the next few hours I will return to Ecuador to attend to this emergency. Neither complicity nor cover-up, here the truth will be known,” Lasso said on X, a social media platform.
The public prosecutor’s office said that its agents, along with police and the military, were “executing security protocols… in light of the disturbance that occurred Friday afternoon.” It added that “in the coming hours, specialized military personnel will carry out the first raids and reconnaissance of Cellblock 7, where the incidents originated, to take control of the situation.”
Guayas 1 is one of five facilities that make up a large prison complex in Guayaquil, a key port city that has become one of the country’s increasingly bloody centers of a turf war between rival drug-trafficking gangs. In late July, a riot in the Guayas 1 prison left more than 30 people dead.