Ecuador declares emergency after 5 police gunned down

Five police officers were killed, several more wounded and prison guards taken hostage in the latest wave of attacks in a deadly gang war consuming Ecuador, authorities said.

President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of exception and nightly curfew in two coastal provinces, Guayas and Esmeraldas. The move allows the government to limit freedom of assembly and movement.

Officials said organised crime groups launched nine attacks with explosives and firearms against police and oil installations in response to a transfer of inmates from Guayas 1 prison.

The prison, in the southwestern port city of Guayaquil, is one of the main scenes of a series of prison massacres that have left about 400 inmates dead since February 2021.

"We have had reactions" of "organised crime" in Guayaquil and in the northwestern oil port of Esmeraldas, Interior Minister Juan Zapata told reporters in the capital, Quito.

These included car bomb attacks and a bombing at a bus terminal.

In the early morning hours, two police officers died when their patrol car was attacked by people with firearms in Guayaquil, according to police.

Three more officers were gunned down later in the day in the port and the nearby city of Duran, police said.

A separate attack on a police station there left two officers injured.

In Esmeraldas -- the same city where two headless bodies were found hanging from a pedestrian bridge -- inmates took eight guards hostage, according to the SNAI prison authority.