Police walk on top of Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, Ecuador, in November 2022 [File: Dolores Ochoa/AP Photo]

Six Colombians arrested as the alleged assassins of a candidate in Ecuador's August presidential election were slain Friday inside a prison in Guayaquil, officials announced.

Iran PressAmerica: The killings took place on Friday in the Litoral Penitentiary in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, the attorney general’s office said.

The SNAI prisons agency said in a statement that the six men who were killed were Colombian nationals.

They “are of Colombian nationality and were accused of the murder of the former presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio”, the prison authority said.

Ecuador’s government condemned the prison killings and President Guillermo Lasso pledged in a message on social media that there would be “neither complicity nor cover-up” in getting to the bottom of who killed the suspects in the Villavicencio case.

“Here, the truth will be known,” Lasso said.

Lasso also said he was temporarily calling off a visit to Seoul and returning from a trip to New York, where he had arrived on Thursday, to handle the incident.

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