Gunmen in Ecuador opened fire in a restaurant in a beach town popular with tourists, killing at least six people and wounding six more, prosecutors said on Sunday.
The attack happened on Saturday night in a busy nightlife area of the town of Montanita on the Pacific coast, the prosecutors’ office said on Twitter.
It gave no information on the age or identity of the people who were shot.
Photo: AFP
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s top producers of cocaine, Ecuador is weathering the biggest surge in crime in its recent history.
Crime linked to drug trafficking caused the murder rate to almost double from 2021 to last year.
A woman who was near the restaurant at the time of the latest shooting described hearing gunshots.
“We heard the noise — boom, boom, boom — and people said: ‘Run, run, it’s a shootout,’” the woman told reporters.
She declined to give her name, saying she feared reprisal.
It was the second mass shooting in days on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.
On Thursday, gunmen burst into a wake at a funeral home in the nearby town of Manta and started shooting, killing four people and leaving eight wounded.
Ecuadoran President Guillermo Lasso has tried to counter the crime wave by declaring a state of emergency in the hardest-hit provinces, such as Santa Elena, which includes Montanita.
The measure allows for deploying soldiers in the streets and declaring curfews.
The government also started letting people carry guns for self-defense.
Still, the country is seeing one massacre after another.
In the middle of last month, a group comprising dozens of attackers opened fire at the fishing port in the town of Esmeraldas, killing nine people in what the government called a drug turf war. Two weeks later attackers on motorcycles killed 10 people watching a soccer game in an auto workshop.
The government blames the violence on fights between drug gangs battling for power and control of routes to ship cocaine and other drugs from the Pacific coast to Europe and the US.
These battles have also claimed lives in prisons, as rival gangs fight each other behind bars. More than 420 inmates have died in rioting since 2021.
From January through last month the government seized 64 tonnes of drugs, mainly cocaine. Last year the government confiscated more than 200 tonnes of drugs.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of