The National Service of Comprehensive Care for Adults and Adolescents (SNAI) confirmed this Saturday that no victims were registered after the explosion last night (Friday) of a car bomb in front of the main door of the Guayaquil regional jail, One of the largest prisons in Ecuador.
“They have not been reported dead or injured, nIn the penitentiary population, or in the staff of the institutions. Nor have they recorded leaks. The facts are still under investigation, “said SNAI.
The explosion occurred around 20:15 local time (01:15 GMT) and was recorded in a surveillance chamber in front of the main access to the regional jail of Guayaquil that even caught the flight of the driver left by the car bomb.
These images show how an off -road truck reaches the exteriors of the prison entrance in the opposite direction and, a few meters from the door, there is a sudden explosion that seems to surprise, even, even the driver, who jumps from the vehicle still underway.
The man, who carries a white cap, falls to the ground and get up to flee from the place to the other side of the road while the car begins to burn in flames.
At that time the exteriors of the Guayaquil Regional Prison They looked without any exterior surveillance, when usual are usually strongly protected from police and military, who prevent vehicles from stopping in front of the jail.
Nor do the flames seem to generate any type of alert from inside the jail, without observing anyone to notice the emergency during the more than 90 seconds that the vehicle burns in flames until a large explosion occurs that destroys the car.
After the main outbreak, the pieces of the vehicle are burning at least twenty meters around, while the traffic of the road to Daule where the prison is located continues to transit at all times.
Similar precedents
The event is similar to other previous episodes with other bomb cars used by criminal gangs in Ecuador, where they usually set a vehicle loaded with dynamite or cylinders (bottle) gas tacos to cause a large deflagration, similar to view in this explosion.
This happened just one day after some hitmen tried to kill the director of the regional jail of Guayaquil, thanks to the bullets failed to transfer the armored glass of the windows of the vehicle where he was traveling, as reported by the SNA, the Government’s Office of the Government of the prisons.
It also occurred after this week they registered massacres in the prisons of Ecuador, with two killings in different prisons with a total of 31 people killed, including thirty inmates and a penitentiary guard.
Epicenter of violence
The prisons are one of the epicenters of the unprecedented criminal violence crisis that Ecuador is going through, having been killed inside 600 inmates since 2021, most of them in a series of massacres by clashes between rival gangs.
The regional prison of Guayaquil is one of the largest in Ecuador with more than 4,000 inmates inside, where members of the Choneros, the oldest criminal band and one of the largest in the country predominate.
From this prison, the drug trafficker and leader of the Choneros, José Adolfo Macías Villamar (‘Fito’), who remained for a year and a half in an unknown whereabouts until he was arrested at the end of last June in an underground bunker near Manta, cradle of this criminal organization, and was extradited shortly after to the United States.
