QUITO | Four children from the same family, including a five-month-old baby, were killed by gunmen in Guayaquil, a major crime-plagued port in Ecuador, on Monday night, we learned from official sources.
The public prosecutor's office announced on the X network that it had “opened an investigation into the murder of four children.”
Unidentified gunmen broke into a house around 9 p.m., apparently with the wrong aim in mind, and opened fire on the family living there, a local police official said during a news conference. General Victor Herrera.
The children were five months, three years, five years and seven years old. Her parents were injured and the mother was in serious condition, “with a cautious prognosis,” this official announced.
In fact, the gunmen targeted an “adjacent apartment,” where police later found explosives “for carrying out attacks,” according to General Herrera.
The tragedy occurred in the Guasmo sector, a poor neighborhood of Guayaquil where two rival criminal gangs, Los Lagartos and Mafia 18, operate.
Guayaquil is a large port city with 3.2 million inhabitants at the mouth of the Guayas River in the Pacific and the most important transshipment point for drugs from Peru and Colombia.
It is the epicenter of criminal violence in the country, with executions, assassinations and reckonings taking place almost daily between rival gangs vying for control of the drug trade.