QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — A bomb threat sent an anti-explosives unit scrambling into a bustling area of Ecuador’s tense capital Thursday while authorities in a western city resported a nightclub arson killed two people as the South American country staggers under a spike in violence.
Police in the capital, Quito, said they evacuated people from the area surrounding the Playón de la Marín bus station when they were alerted about a backpack with an alleged explosive placed in a garbage can.
The backpack turned out to not have any explosives, authorities said, but it followed five similar incidents in the capital Wednesday with actual explosives. Those bombs — in two vehicles, at a pedestrian bridge and near a prison — caused minor damage but no deaths or injuries.
Meanwhile, authorities told reporters that unknown suspects set fire to a nightclub in the Amazon city of Coca, killing at least two people and injuring nine others. The blaze, which spread to 11 nearby stores, is under investigation, officials said.
Ecuador is in the grips of a crime wave blamed on drug trafficking gangs. Ecuadoreans worry that violence will only escalate in a country where a presidential candidate was assassinated last year.
President Daniel Noboa, who earlier this week declared an emergency and a virtual war on the gangs, said Thursday that Ecuador needs “tougher laws, honest judges” and the possibility of extraditing dangerous criminals in order to fight terrorism and organized crime.
“We are not going to let a group of terrorists stop the country,” Noboa said in a recorded message sent to media outlets in which he also presented the design of two new prisons. He said the corrections system has been “controlled by mafias” for decades and is in urgent need of new facilities.
Noboa said prisons will be built in two provinces and each will have super-, maximum- and high-security units and will be equipped with technology to block cellphone and satellite signals. He previously said the new prisons would be ready in 10 to 11 months.
Gang members in prisons throughout the country have taken corrections personnel hostage since Sunday, when the leader of one of the country’s most powerful drug gangs vanished from prison.
On Thursday, inmates managed to increase to 178 the number of corrections personnel they are holding hostage, according to the prisons agency.
A union that represents prison employees has asked officials to guarantee the “physical and psychological integrity” of the hostages.
