2023-04-30 18:37:00
“A total of 10 people were killed” in the attack, which took place around midnight on Saturday, a local police official told reporters via the messaging app WhatsApp.
The gruesome attack, which one witness described as a shooting, took place at a mechanics workshop in the city’s southwest. Bodies might be seen lying in pools of blood on the pavement, people were crying and hugging each other, and police cordoned off the area, AFP reporters saw.
Ecuador’s attorney general’s office said on Twitter that it had opened a “preliminary investigation into the killing of 10 people following an armed attack on Saturday night… Two more people were injured.”
Local police also confirmed the death toll in Guayaquil, which has become one of the centers of the country’s increasingly bloody turf war between rival drug-trafficking gangs.
Due to its location on the Pacific coast, this port city is a strategic point for drug shipments to the United States and Europe.
The killing is the latest in a spate of violence, including gang- and cartel-related killings, a series of riots and prison killings as officers crack down on gangs and seize drugs.
One witness to the latest attack, who asked not to be identified, told AFP that “there was a shootout” at a place where several people were drinking when a group of attackers “came on motorbikes and took the lives of the people who were there”.
Police have not yet announced any arrests.
Guayaquil has been under a state of emergency since April 1, allowing the military to mobilize in the streets and impose a curfew.
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