Category Archives: Gangs

Armed gang storms Ecuador TV station as state of ‘internal armed conflict’ declared

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Gangsters unleashed wave of terror following move by President Daniel Noboa in response to gang leader’s prison escape

Heavily armed gangsters have stormed the studio of a major television station in Ecuador during a live broadcast, prompting the country’s president to declare a state of “internal armed conflict” amid a series of seemingly coordinated attacks across the South American country.

Police special forces later arrested all the masked gunmen who invaded the headquarters of the TC Televisión network in Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, at about 2pm local time on Tuesday.

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Haiti’s gang wars having ‘cataclysmic’ impact on access to food staples

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About 22,000 people have been displaced amid murders, looting, kidnappings and widespread sexual violence, new UN report says

Haiti’s brutal gang wars have spread from the capital to key farming heartlands, displacing tens of thousands of people and having a devastating impact on access to food staples, the United Nations has warned.

Violence has gradually escalated in the Bas-Artibonite region north of the capital, the source of staples such as rice, according to a new report released on Tuesday, which said about 22,000 had been displaced amid murders, looting, kidnappings and widespread sexual violence.

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Former Hells Angels boss accused of disposing bodies in ‘the pizza oven’

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US prosecutors allege Merl Hefferman, 54, illegally cremated up to four members killed by the group at a California funeral home

Federal prosecutors say that a former Hells Angels boss disposed of the bodies of up to four of the group’s members at a central California funeral home, known to the gang as “the pizza oven”.

US prosecutors set out in gruesome detail last week how they believe members of the gang used the Yost and Webb funeral home in Fresno, California, to cremate four men.

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‘People are dying in the street’: Ecuador election overshadowed by violent crime

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The country goes to the polls this weekend after a campaign marked by bloodshed and the assassination of a candidate

Ecuadoreans will this weekend choose between a centre-right presidential candidate who is the scion of one of country’s wealthiest families, and a leftist disciple of the former president Rafael Correa, in an election overshadowed by violent crime and the assassination of a third candidate.

Polls ahead of Sunday’s vote put the banana industry heir Daniel Noboa, 35, slightly ahead of Luisa González, who has promised free medicine and increased worker protections.

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Met police failing children at risk and victim blaming, says damning report

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Inspectorate demands emergency changes as Scotland Yard accepts its child protection services are in chaos

The Metropolitan police are failing in their efforts to protect children from criminal and sexual exploitation while bungling efforts to find missing young people, a damning official report has found.

The findings have led Scotland Yard to accept its child protection services are in chaos, and a senior officer admitted that “too often we are letting them down”. The policing inspectorate, which authored the report, said it was also concerned with “the frequency with which officers and staff use victim-blaming language”.

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Sweden reports record number of monthly fatal shootings

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September brings 11 deaths as country rocked by wave of violence, much of it suspected to be linked to split within criminal gang

September has become the worst month for shooting deaths in Sweden since records began in 2016, after two people died in separate shootings on Wednesday night, bringing the monthly total to 11.

Another person died on Thursday morning after a bomb blast.

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Haiti gang leader vows to fight any foreign armed force if it commits abuses

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Jimmy Chérizier, ex-police officer known by nickname ‘Barbecue’, also urges Haitians to mobilize against government

Haiti’s most powerful gang leader has warned that he and his gunmen would fight any international armed force deployed to the Caribbean country if it committed any abuses.

Jimmy Chérizier, a former police officer known by his nickname “Barbecue”, also urged Haitians to mobilize against the government. “We are asking the population to rise up,” he said at a news conference.

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Brazil: at least 45 killed in string of police operations in three states

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Ten people were killed in Rio favela and 19 people reportedly died in state of Bahia, while death toll rose to 16 in São Paulo region

At least 45 people have been killed in a string of police operations across three Brazilian states, in a particularly bloody week even for Brazil – a country notorious for its police violence.

Ten people were killed during an operation by civil and military police against drug traffickers into the Complexo da Penha favela in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday morning, with residents saying that heavy gunfire began at 3am.

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El Salvador clears way for mass trials as crackdown on gangs ramps up

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Congress passes bill that could allow 900 people to be tried together if they are accused of being in the same criminal group

Nayib Bukele’s government has already locked up 2% of El Salvador’s adult population and built the largest prison in the Americas to house the 70,000 alleged gang members he has imprisoned.

Now the populist leader has cleared the way for mass trials of hundreds of people at a time as he steps up his year-long crackdown on the country’s gangs which critics say is eroding the rule of law and leading to many innocent people being wrongly jailed.

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Mexico: IEDs kill four police officers and two civilians in ‘brutal’ cartel ambush

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Another 14 wounded after seven improvised devices set off in attack by organized crime group in Tlajomulco, Jalisco state

Four police officers and two civilians have been killed by bombs planted in a road in western Mexico that officials said were an ambush set by a drug cartel.

The attack late on Tuesday appeared to mark the first time that Mexican criminals have successfully targeted law-enforcement personnel with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in the latest example of the brazen military challenge posed by organized crime groups in the country.

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UN expert calls for arms embargo on Haiti amid gang violence

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William O’Neill says ‘survival of a nation’ is at stake and also calls for deployment of an international force

A UN official has called for an immediate arms embargo for Haiti and an intervention force to combat endemic gang violence in the Caribbean state, after the killings of more than 200 gang members in recent months.

William O’Neill, who was appointed in April as an expert on human rights in Haiti, added his voice to growing calls for an international intervention in the country, which has descended into crime-fuelled anarchy since the murder of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

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Honduras starts El Salvador-style crackdown on gangs after massacres

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Police investigating possibility pool hall shooting that killed 11 could be revenge for massacre of 46 female inmates at prison

Authorities in Honduras have launched an El Salvador-style crackdown and arrested a suspect in a pool hall shooting on Saturday that killed 11 people.

Police said they were investigating the possibility the pool hall shooting could be revenge for last week’s gang-related massacre of 46 female inmates, the worst atrocity at a women’s prison in recent memory.

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Gunmen kidnap US citizens who crossed into Mexico to buy medicine

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Gunmen opened fire on vehicle in northern city of Matamoros, and FBI is offering $50,000 reward for return of victims

Gunmen kidnapped four US citizens who crossed into Mexico from Texas last week to buy medicine and got caught in a shootout that killed at least one Mexican citizen, officials said on Monday.

The four were in a white minivan with North Carolina license plates. They came under fire on Friday shortly after entering the city of Matamoros from Brownsville, the southernmost tip of Texas near the Gulf coast, the FBI San Antonio division office said in a statement on Sunday.

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El Salvador moves suspected gang members to 40,000-capacity ‘megaprison’

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Around 2,000 inmates transferred on Friday as part of president’s crime crackdown

El Salvador’s government has moved thousands of suspected gang members to a newly opened “megaprison”, the latest step in a controversial crackdown on crime that has caused the Central American nation’s prison population to soar.

“This will be their new home, where they won’t be able to do any more harm to the population,” the president, Nayib Bukele, wrote on Twitter.

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Haitian ambassador warns criminal gangs may overrun country

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Armed gangs have shut off access to Haiti’s main fuel terminal, decimating basic services amid a cholera and hunger crisis

The Haitian ambassador to Washington has appealed to the international community to accelerate talks on deploying an armed intervention, warning that criminal gangs were in danger of taking over the country.

Bocchit Edmond made his appeal as efforts to agree to a UN resolution backing such a force appear to have stalled, and as the US and Canada have been holding urgent talks looking for ways to break the impasse.

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Services for county lines victims in England and Wales get funding boost

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Up to £5m allocated to help young people escape drug gangs, with money also going to helpline

Up to £5m has been allocated by the Home Office to support victims of county lines exploitation over the next three years.

Hundreds of victims will be helped to escape drug gangs following the expansion of support services in London, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

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Woman shot dead at home in Liverpool seven years after brother killed

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Tributes were paid to council worker Ashley Dale, 28, who police believe was killed in a mistaken identity attack

Tributes have been paid to a 28-year-old woman who was shot dead in her home in Liverpool in the early hours of Sunday, seven years after her brother was also fatally shot.

Ashley Dale was shot in the back garden of her home in what is believed by police to have been a mistaken identity attack. Her younger brother, Lewis Dunne, was killed in 2015 at age 16 after a gang mistook him for a rival gang member. Their deaths are not believed to be connected.

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Gang warfare traps thousands in Haiti slum as fuel crisis add to desperation

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Calls for aid to be let into Port-au-Prince district after ‘battlefield’ violence leaves dozens dead and cuts supplies of food and water

Haiti’s capital has been racked by a week of heavy fighting between gangs, with the global medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warning that thousands of people were trapped without food or water in one district of Port-au-Prince’s notorious Cité Soleil slum.

“We are calling on all belligerents to allow aid to enter Brooklyn and to spare civilians,” said Mumuza Muhindo, the MSF’s head of mission in Haiti, in a statement referring to the contested area within the sprawling Cité Soleil.

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El Salvador to escalate its security crackdown after death of police officers

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President Nayib Bukele vowed to step up its ‘war on gangs’ even as 2% of the country’s population is jailed

El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has vowed to escalate his controversial “war on gangs” after three police officers were killed in what appeared to be the first major reaction to a security crackdown that critics have called one of the most dramatic in recent Latin American history.

Bukele’s government claims more than 43,000 Salvadorians have been thrown in jail since it imposed a “state of exception” in late March – leaving almost 2% of the country’s entire adult population behind bars.

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‘House of love’: the calm, creative space changing young lives in Karachi

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In Lyari, a slum notorious for violence in Pakistan’s most populous city, Mehr Ghar offers young people a safe place to hang out and study – and, for many, an alternative path to gang life

Living in Lyari was like living on the frontlines of a war, says Nauroz Ghani, who grew up in the Karachi slum notorious for its bloody gang battles. So used to the constant gunfire, he says he would “become restless if a day passed by without hearing the sound of a firing”.

“My teenage years were lost to violence,” says Ghani, 24. “I had no interest in getting an education. Instead, I was attracted by their guns and activities.” He saw dead bodies on the street and one boy was killed in front of him. “All of us who lived during those days have such memories. We lived in terror, but it had become habitual.”

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