Six Colombian inmates killed in a prison in Ecuador were all suspects in the murder of the country’s anticorruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio earlier this year, Ecuadorian authorities have confirmed.
The killings took place on Friday in Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, the attorney general’s office said.
The SNAI prisons agency said in a statement that the six men who were killed were Colombian nationals.
They “are of Colombian nationality and were accused of the murder of the former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio”, the prison authority said.
Ecuador’s government condemned the prison killings and President Guillermo Lasso pledged in a message on social media that there would be “neither complicity nor cover-up” in getting to the bottom of who killed the suspects in the Villavicencio case.
“Here, the truth will be known,” Lasso said.
Lasso also said he was temporarily calling off a visit to Seoul and returning from a trip to New York, where he had arrived on Thursday, to handle the incident.
