Six Colombian suspects in the August assassination of Ecuador presidential candidate and anti-corruption crusader Fernando Villavicencio were killed in prison on Friday, officials said, just a week to a key election run-off.
Right-wing President Guillermo Lasso, who is on a private trip to New York and was due in South Korea on Saturday for an official visit, called off his foreign trip to immediately return to Ecuador to handle the incident.
The SNAI prisons authority announced that “an event occurred” in the Guayas 1 prison in Guayaquil “resulting in six dead people.”
It later clarified the deceased were “of Colombian nationality and accused of the murder of former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.”
Villavicencio, a 59-year-old journalist, was gunned down on August 9 as he left a campaign rally in the capital Quito days ahead of the first round vote, 11 days to the first round of voting.
After news broke of the prison deaths, Lasso said he was returning home.
“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, formerly Twitter.
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 in a statement on X 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.”
Authorities have provided no further details about the killings, which come just days before the second round of voting in the presidential election on October 15.
The run-off will be between a close associate of former socialist president Rafael Correa, of whom Villavicencio was a fierce opponent, and a right-wing candidate.
AFP