Remains of 18 inmates killed in the last two massacres remain to be handed over to relatives

The work of identifying the inmates killed in the latest massacres recorded in the Litoral Penitentiary has taken weeks due to the deterioration of the remains.

Legal Medicine even had to temporarily transfer experts and anthropologists to Guayaquil to speed up the work. The task has not been easy, as specialists have had to put pieces together to try to identify bodies that had been dismembered.

In the two massacres (September 28 and November 13), a total of 187 bodies arrived at the Crime Laboratory. Of that number there are still 18 in a refrigerated container that was authorized and that remains in the Legal Medicine yards.

New massacre at the Litoral Penitentiary: 68 inmates killed and 25 wounded, according to the Prosecutor’s Office

Major Rubén Terán, head of the Guayaquil Laboratory, explained that 122 bodies arrived in the first massacre, of which 114 have been delivered.

The rest were given DNA tests, the results of which have already arrived and they hope that this week the Prosecutor’s Office and the Violent Death Unit (Dinased) will already notify the missing families.

From the most recent massacre, 65 bodies arrived at the laboratory. Although at the beginning it had been reported that there were 62 corpses, some dismembered, Terán clarifies that the figure rose, not because three wounded have died, but because the human remains had been cremated and calcified with the mattresses and there were more pieces than expected.

Of the 65 bodies, 55 have been identified and 54 have been delivered. Until midday on Friday, the experts waited for a family to arrive to remove the last of the bodies identified by their fingerprints and morphological characteristics.

“41 were identified by their fingerprints and 9 by forensic anthropology and 5 by both techniques. The other 10 bodies are going to be subjected to DNA tests, the results will be in 40 days, ”explained Major Terán.

The number of violent deaths of inmates reported this year in the country’s prisons has been the highest figure in the last decade: 327. Last year they were 52.

Ecuador’s prison crisis, which the authorities link to a dispute between gangs seeking to take control of pavilions, has been around the world this year.

Concerned about the acts of violence that have taken place in Ecuador’s prisons, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) announced that it will come to the country for a working visit from December 1-3.

There he will analyze the situation faced by inmates or those deprived of liberty in Ecuador’s detention centers, which have been marked by high rates of violence, “for which he thanks the State for its openness and acceptance to carry out said visit.”

How was the identification process?

Just to identify the 122 inmates murdered in September, at least 600 interviews were conducted with relatives of inmates for identification. In many cases, relatives came to the Guayaquil morgue worried that their relatives were among the victims. In parallel, the experts continued with other biometric work.

The lack of a defined list of those absent from the wards established several complications in this work, which made the universe of comparison much broader.

80 guards without arms for 8,000 inmates: what is happening in the Litoral Penitentiary, the Ecuadorian prison that adds almost 190 deaths in two massacres

Another drawback is the poor conditions of a small group of corpses that arrived at the morgue, which would not allow to establish identity through fingerprints or facial recognition.

In the identification process, a “common autopsy” was not carried out due to the state in which the corpses arrived, several were cremated and even beheaded.

For this, the relatives are asked for information about the inmate, such as physical details such as skin color, tattoos, scars, fractures and teeth. (I)