A suspected gang assault on a pool corridor in Ecuador in a single day left seven useless and 4 wounded, police mentioned 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 hearth 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 mentioned.
Ecuador is some extent of departure for cocaine shipments to the USA and Europe, and a hub for felony teams concerned in extortion and contract killings — a few of them linked to cartels based mostly in Mexico, Colombia or Albania.
The late Friday assault was the fourth of its type in latest weeks. In August, seven folks had been killed in a pool corridor in the identical metropolis. A related pool corridor bloodbath passed off in July within the southwestern vacationer metropolis of Basic Villamil Playas, leaving not less than 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 12 months, a 47% enhance from the identical interval of 2024, knowledge from the Ecuadoran Observatory of Organized Crime exhibits.
Felony gang violence continues unabated following the recapture in June of the nation’s largest 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 USA, and he pleaded not responsible. A seven-count indictment prices 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 12 months, the U.S. labeled Los Choneros as probably the most violent gangs and affirmed its connection to highly effective Mexican drug cartels, which threaten Ecuador and the encircling area
