A suspected gang assault on a pool corridor in Ecuador in a single day left seven useless and 4 wounded, police stated Saturday. It marked the second such assault in lower than a month in the identical metropolis throughout a wave of violence within the nation.
Movies posted on social media confirmed gunmen, most of them masked, opening fireplace as folks performed billiards within the metropolis of Santo Domingo, about 100 miles west of Quito.
“Presumably this violent incident stems from a territorial dispute between organized crime teams and arranged armed teams,” police Colonel Beatriz Benavides stated.
Ecuador is a degree of departure for cocaine shipments to the US and Europe, and a hub for felony teams concerned in extortion and contract killings — a few of them linked to cartels primarily based in Mexico, Colombia or Albania.
The late Friday assault was the fourth of its variety in current weeks. In August, seven folks had been killed in a pool corridor in the identical metropolis. A comparable pool corridor bloodbath passed off in July within the southwestern vacationer metropolis of Common Villamil Playas, leaving at the very least 9 useless.
In April, armed males killed 12 folks at a cockfighting ring 18 miles from Santo Domingo.
Ecuador recorded greater than 4,600 homicides within the first half of the yr, a 47% enhance from the identical interval of 2024, information from the Ecuadoran Observatory of Organized Crime reveals.
Prison gang violence continues unabated following the recapture in June of the nation’s greatest drug lord, Adolfo Macías, alias Fito, after he escaped from a maximum-security jail in 2024.
In July, the Ecuadoran authorities extradited Macías to the US, and he pleaded not responsible. A seven-count indictment costs Macías, who leads the gang Los Choneros, and an unidentified co-defendant with worldwide cocaine distribution, conspiracy and weapons counts, together with smuggling firearms from the U.S.
Final yr, the U.S. categorized Los Choneros as one of the crucial violent gangs and affirmed its connection to highly effective Mexican drug cartels, which threaten Ecuador and the encompassing area
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