Ecuador’s president confirms journalists killed along border
QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno on Friday confirmed that three press workers kidnapped along the conflictive border with Colombia had been killed, opening the door to a military strike against their captors.
Moreno spoke after a 12-hour deadline ended with the captors failing to demonstrate the hostages were still alive.
“Despite our best efforts, we’ve confirmed that these criminals never had the intention of handing them back safe and sound,” Moreno said.
He said elite troops would soon be deployed to the northern border area where the employees of El Comercio newspaper were last seen nearly three weeks ago while investigating a rise in drug-fueled violence. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos dispatched his top military advisers to Quito to assist in the military planning.
Moreno also offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the capture of Walter Arizala, better known by his alias Guacho, the leader of a holdout group of guerrillas from the demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.
Fears that the kidnapping had ended in tragedy emerged Thursday when a Colombian TV network said it had received gruesome photos purporting to show the bodies of the three men.
However forensic experts in both countries were unable to confirm the authenticity of the images, exasperating press groups and family members who say the government had been taking the incident too lightly.
Moreno on Thursday night rushed back from a regional summit in Peru to deal with a crisis that has shaken Ecuadoreans’ long held self-identity as a tiny, peaceful nation insulated from the drug-fueled violence raging across its border. In a late-night press conference, he said there was an “enormous possibility” the deaths were real and on Friday said authorities had obtained new, unspecified information that confirmed the three men had been killed.