Gunmen Storm Television Studio Live On Air In Ecuador

Masked gunmen have broken into a live television studio in Ecuador and threatened terrified staff.

Employees were forced on to the floor during the broadcast by the public television channel TC in the city of Guayaquil before the live feed cut out.

Police say they later freed all the staff and made 13 arrests, showing off weapons recovered.

At least 10 people have been killed since a 60-day state of emergency began in Ecuador on Monday.

The emergency was declared after a notorious gangster vanished from his prison cell. It is unclear whether the incident at the TV studio in Guayaquil was related to the disappearance from a prison in the same city of the boss of the Choneros gang, Adolfo Macías Villamar, or Fito as he is better known.

In neighbouring Peru, the government ordered the immediate deployment of a police force to the border to prevent any instability crossing into the country.

The US has said it condemns the “brazen attacks” in Ecuador and is “co-ordinating closely” with President Daniel Noboa and his Ecuadorean government and stands “ready to provide assistance”.

Ecuador is one of the world’s top banana exporters, but also exports oil, coffee, cocoa, shrimps and fish products. A surge in violence in the Andean nation, inside and outside its prisons, has been linked to fighting between drug cartels, both foreign and local, over control of cocaine routes to the US and Europe.

A woman could be heard pleading, “Don’t shoot, please don’t shoot,” AFP news agency reports, while a person could be heard screaming in apparent pain.

“Please, they came in to kill us,” a TC employee told AFP in a WhatsApp message. “God don’t let this happen. The criminals are on air.”

President Noboa said  that an “internal armed conflict” now existed in the country and he was mobilising the armed forces to carry out “military operations to neutralise” what he called “transnational organised crime, terrorist organisations and belligerent non-state actors”.

He was responding to a wave of recent jail riots and escapes from prisons and other acts of violence blamed by authorities on

criminal gangs.

At least seven police officers were also kidnapped and a video circulating on social media shows three of the kidnapped officers sitting on the ground with a gun pointed at them as one is forced to read a statement addressed to President Noboa, AFP reports.

Police have ordered the evacuation of the government compound in Quito over security concerns.

Quito residents told Reuters news agency the city was in chaos since news of the attack at the TV station in Guayaquil.

“There’s too much nervousness in the city,” said Mario Urena. “At work, people are leaving earlier. All the people are leaving, you see a lot of traffic and alarms everywhere. There’s a chaos.”

Other people in the city of Cuenca told AFP of their shock at seeing the TV station seized.

“In Ecuador, we have never seen this kind of thing, where a channel has been practically hijacked and a broadcast starts with shootings, with kidnappings,” said Francisco Rosas. “So what kind of security situation are we in? And if a television station is capable of receiving this type of robbery, this type of insecurity, imagine restaurants or shops.”

BBC