DailyMail.com – The Litoral Penitentiary in the coastal city of Guayaquil has been the site of frequent riots and mass killings, including one in 2021 that left 119 inmates dead.
The National Service of Comprehensive Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders, which oversees the prison system, said in a statement that detainees were involved in a brawl in one of the jail’s cell blocks.
Security forces guard prisoners who were forced to lie on a courtyard at the Litoral Penitentiary in Ecuador following Tuesday’s fight that left at least 15 inmates dead.
Images taken inside the prison showed law enforcement officials standing next to the body of a slain prisoner lying on the roof. Shirtless inmates were seen in handcuffs and lying on the ground of a courtyard as law enforcement agents carried out searches.
Aerial video footage showed authorities bringing out dead bodies before they were taken to the medical examiner’s office.
The sister of one of the victims told Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo that the death toll could be much higher.
‘They threw grenades at them, they decapitated them, they cut them up. The police themselves, while they were there (outside the prison), showed me the videos that show (the bodies) in the upper part; they are all lying there,’ she said.
‘That is why we came here, because they already said that there are not 17 or anything, there are like 35, 40 dead. That is what they gave information inside (the prison) itself.’
The mass killing is bound to agitate Ecuador’s presidential race, where the law-and-order incumbent, Daniel Noboa, has made improving security, including inside detention facilities, a top priority in his bid to seek re-election next year.
Ecuador’s prisons have become among the deadliest in Latin America as overcrowding, corruption and weak state control have allowed gangs connected to drug traffickers in Colombia and Mexico to proliferate.
Many are heavily armed with weapons smuggled in from the outside and continue to organize criminal activity from behind bars.
The Litoral Penitentiary currently houses about 10,000 inmates – or double its capacity.
