The explosion killed five people and injured 17 others, two of whom are in serious condition, while causing extensive material damage.
Police in Ecuador on Wednesday arrested a suspect in the investigation into Sunday’s bomb explosion in Guayaquil (southwest) that killed five people and injured nearly twenty others, the interior minister announced.
The man “confessed to being involved in the terrorist attack” in the Cristo del Consuelo neighborhood, Patricio Carillo said via Twitter (@CarilloRosero).
On Sunday, two people on a motorcycle left a bag containing a powerful bomb near a restaurant before fleeing.
The explosion killed five people and injured 17 others, two of whom are in serious condition, while causing extensive material damage.
President Guillermo Lasso declared a thirty-day state of emergency in the coastal city of 2.8 million people, Ecuador’s largest port.
“This is the type of crime that Ecuador is facing now,” the minister said, adding “a clear message for everyone: either we will act as an organized and determined state, or the consequences will be very serious.”
Drugs, guns, ammunition and a hand grenade were also seized in the police operation.
The once peaceful country, which neighbors Colombia and Peru, the two countries where the largest quantities of cocaine are produced in the world, has turned into a center for the trafficking of the white powder to Europe and the USA and at the same time a battleground between various gangs , according to authorities and analysts.
The gold-rich drug trade breeds passions, conflicts and violent settlement of accounts that the authorities seem unable to control.
The homicide rate rose from 6 to 14 per 100,000 inhabitants between 2018 and 2022, according to Interior Ministry statistics.
Guayaquil is the city with the highest number of murders in the entire country (32.5%). Since the beginning of the year, 861 people have been murdered there.
Clashes between gangs, believed to actually control several of the country’s prisons, have claimed the lives of more than 350 inmates since February 2021.
RES-EMP
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