image source, Police Ecuador
The arrest of the members of the gang that took hostages following assaulting a hospital in Ecuador was shared on social networks.
Ecuadorian police have arrested seven gunmen who stormed a hospital on Sunday night to try to kill a teenager who was being treated there.
The gang members took the nurses hostage and exchanged fire with the police before being arrested.
The five hostages were released and no one was injured, authorities said.
“At approximately 7:00 p.m., heavily armed criminals entered the Napoleón Dávila Hospital with the aim of making an attempt on the life of a citizen ‘alias Cara Sucia’,” the police said in a statement posted on social networks. “Seven criminals were apprehended and several firearms and ammunition were seized,” he added.
The target of the attack, a 17-year-old boy, is believed to be a rival gang member who is in intensive care recovering from gunshot wounds.
The gunmen held five staff members hostage for more than an hour, a hospital employee told the local newspaper “El Diario.”
Video circulating on social media appears to show men in ski masks holding guns and briefly pushing a screaming woman through one of the hospital’s exit doors before dragging her back inside the building.
Other hospital employees in the western Ecuadorian town of Chone said they had locked themselves in rooms as gunmen broke down the doors looking for the teenager.
“They didn’t know the layout of the hospital, apparently, and that’s why these criminals walked all over the hospital,” Homero Andrade, who represents hospital employees, told “El Diario.”
“Thank God and the police we are still here to tell it,” Andrade added.
increase in violence
The President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, He also thanked the police. saying that his intervention had saved lives.
The president shared images on Twitter showing armed officers preparing to enter the building before the arrests.
Gang violence in Ecuador has increased considerably in recent yearsincluding tactics such as beheadings, and a series of deadly prison riots have occurred.
Analysts believe this uptick in violence is due in part to the expansion of violent Mexican cartels into Ecuador, where they recruit local gangs to smuggle cocaine.
President Lasso has declared the state of emergency on multiple occasions since he took office last year, in an attempt to deal with the sharp increase in violence.
In early November, he said that attacks by increasingly powerful drug gangs were a declaration of war.
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