The moment when criminals use a woman as a human shield to try to get out of the hospital door. RR.
H.H.
Criminal gangs no longer leave a corner of Ecuador where they do not have a presence, this time seven men with machine guns, rifles and revolvers took over the Chone hospital for almost three hours, a city in the province of Manabí, on the Ecuadorian coast, the Sunday night.
“Don't shoot, I have a daughter!” a nurse who was captured as a hostage and was used as a shield by one of the criminals who asked the uniformed officers to open the external door of the hospital to flee yelled at the police officers.
Inside, hundreds of people, including patients and medical personnel, screamed and cried as shots were heard on the second floor where the intensive care room is.
The criminals were looking for Ángel Leónidas M, a 16-year-old teenager, known by the alias of
Dirty Face.
The Police had been tracking the young man for three years for drug use, micro-trafficking and hit men.
Dirty face is a feared hit man in the province of Manabí, whom the authorities are investigating for his participation in the attempted assassination of a policeman in an operation three months ago, said Commander Fausto Salinas.
He could not be detained at that time and was not heard from until Saturday, when they tried to assassinate him and took him to the Chone hospital, in a delicate state of health, due to the perforations of six bullets that went through his body and left him disabled.
According to Salinas, behind the assassination attempt on the young hitman is the criminal gang Los Choneros, which is dedicated to contract killings, extortion and drug trafficking.
This criminal group is the most prominent in Ecuador, which has gained significant space due to its ties to the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, which it supports in its logistics operations for shipping cocaine to Central America, the United States, and Europe.
Dirty Face is attributed the murder of the uncle of one of the members of Los Choneros, Adolfo Chávez, who is imprisoned in the Guayaquil regional prison, from where the order to kill the teenager came, who belongs to the opposing gang called Los Cornejos. .
The seven delinquents ended up surrendering, releasing the five hostages and the fearful patients who fled as best they could, in wheelchairs or carried by their relatives or paramedics until they got away from the hospital.
This Monday the subjects were prosecuted for the crime of terrorism and a judge ordered their detention in the El Rodeo de Manabí prison, where most of the prisoners are from the Los Choneros gang.
A military contingent provides security outside the hospital, and at least 10 people have been discharged, while other patients have been transferred to other centers.
This is the fourth attack on a health home in the South American country in the last year.
On November 1, some subjects shot at the health center in the Bastión Popular neighborhood in Guayaquil and killed a man who was waiting for a patient.
Since then the center has been shielded with pieces of wood for fear of a new terrorist attack.
Last June, 18 armed people from a criminal gang entered a private hospital to guard the admission of one of its members who had been shot several times in an assassination attempt.
In May 2021, Carla Rocchetti, 40, was in room 1120, on the second floor of a private clinic in Guayaquil, she had been admitted due to abdominal pain and was under observation.
A few hours earlier, the room had been occupied by a man who survived a hit man attack.
While Carla was waiting for the medical discharge, five hit men, two of them dressed in Police uniforms, entered the clinic by emergency, went to room 1120 and murdered the woman.
The Ecuadorian Ministry of Public Health rejected this Monday "acts of violence in health establishments" and assured that they will reinforce security mechanisms, although it did not specify what measures they will take.
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