Ecuador orders the arrest of 16 soldiers accused of the disappearance of 4 children

QUITO, Ecuador — An Ecuadorian judge on Tuesday ordered the arrest of 16 soldiers accused of the disappearance of four children who disappeared three weeks ago in the coastal city of Guayaquil.

Ecuador’s Attorney General’s Office submitted a request to detain the soldiers. In a statement on X, the police agency said its request had been accepted, adding that the detained soldiers would be transferred from a military base to a prison.

The case of the missing children has shaken Ecuador, a nation where the army has been increasingly deployed to patrol cities and fight drug gangs amid rising levels of violence.

The children, between 11 and 15 years old, were reported missing by their parents on December 8, after they went to play soccer in a popular area of Guayaquil and did not return home.

A video taken by a security camera shows a military patrol putting two of the children into the back of a truck and driving away with them.

Ecuador’s military admitted that the children were in its custody and claimed that they were arrested because they were involved in an attempted robbery.

The army says the children were released the same night they were detained and that gangs are to blame for their disappearance.

Meanwhile, detectives last week found four charred bodies near a military base on the outskirts of Guayaquil. On Tuesday afternoon, the Attorney General’s Office said that genetic tests carried out on the bodies, whose faces and fingerprints were unrecognizable, determined that they were the bodies of missing children.

Prosecutors working on the case said they will now have to seek an additional hearing with a judge to issue new charges against the detained soldiers, who will likely face murder charges.

“This is a difficult time for the families,” said Billy Navarrete, director of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has followed the case and advised the children’s relatives. “We will not stop until we find truth and justice.”

The case of the four missing children has sparked protests in Guayaquil and shocked a nation struggling to contain homicides, extortion and human rights abuses.

Violence in Ecuador worsened in January after a gang leader escaped from prison amid deadly unrest. Two days later, members of another drug gang attacked a television station and interrupted a live broadcast to make demands of the government.

President Daniel Noboa’s government has relied on the army to curb gang violence. However, the military has now been implicated in several abuses, including the disappearance of two children in August in the central province of Los Ríos, and the case of a 19-year-old who was shot dead by the military at a checkpoint. control on a highway in Guayaquil.

Noboa, a native of Guayaquil, plans to run for re-election in February. The conservative politician, who belongs to one of the country’s richest families, has promised to reduce violence and resolve power outages that have damaged Ecuador’s economy.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.