Gunmen kill six in Ecuador tourist town: prosecutors

Gunmen in Ecuador opened fire in a restaurant in a beach town popular with tourists, killing at least six people and wounding six more, prosecutors said Sunday.

The attack happened Saturday night in a busy nightlife area of the town of Montanita on the Pacific coast, the prosecutors’ office said on Twitter.

It gave no information on the age or identity of the people who were shot.

Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s top producers of cocaine, Ecuador is weathering the biggest surge in crime in its recent history.

Crime linked to drug trafficking caused the murder rate to almost double from 2021 to 2022.

A woman who was near the restaurant at the time of the latest shooting described hearing gunshots.

“We heard the noise — boom, boom, boom, and people said, ‘run, run, it’s a shootout,’” the woman told AFP. She declined to give her name, saying she feared reprisal.

It was the second mass shooting in days on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.