Moreno said it is highly likely that three press workers ki...

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) - Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno said it was highly likely that three press workers kidnapped along the conflictive border with Colombia were killed and gave their drug-running captors 12 hours to demonstrate otherwise before launching a major military strike against them. Late Thursday, a visibly emotional Moreno had issued an ultimatum to the kidnappers after his government received photos from a Colombian TV station suggesting the three were dead. In a late-night press conference, he said there was an “enormous possibility” the deaths were real and on Friday said authorities had obtained new, unspecified information that confirmed the three men had been killed. He decreed four days of national mourning

As Moreno spoke, dozens of colleagues and friends of reporter Javier Ortega, photographer Paul Rivas and their driver Efrain Segarra gathered in tears in a plaza outside the presidential palace under the slogan "Three Are Missing," the same one that has featured in candlelight vigils held almost every night since their disappearance. Reporter Javier Ortega, photographer Paul Rivas and their driver Efraín Segarra, who work for Ecuadorian daily El Comercio, were kidnapped on 26 March by a holdout faction of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, the leftist rebel group which laid down its weapons and became a political party after signing a 2016 peace deal. US$100,000 bounty

Speaking in Lima, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos denounced the murders as “a deplorable act,” confirming his troops had also been sent in. Earlier this week, authorities dismissed as fake a statement signed by the captors claiming the journalists were killed during a military raid co-ordinated by the two governments. “We condemn the actions of the Colombian and Ecuadorean governments and their lack of seriousness in protecting the reporters’ lives,” Colombia’s Foundation for Press Freedom said in a statement Thursday. In a proof-of-life video released earlier this month, the three men identified their captors as members of the Oliver Sinisterra Front, a group of a few dozen combatants that authorities say is led by a former FARC rebel known by the alias Guacho. Blow to Colombian peace deal as former Farc rebel chief arrested on drug charges Read more

The region has long been a hotbed for Colombian drug traffickers and rebel groups (which are often the same), and has been the setting for a string of recent attacks against military targets. “We have resumed ... military and police operations in the strip of land by the border where they were previously suspended and I am immediately sending in a deployment of elite units from the army and the police,” Moreno said.
The Government of Ecuador says that the three Ecuadorian journalists kidnapped by rebel members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia on 26 March have been murdered. President Lenín Moreno orders military operations on the Colombian border to catch the murderers, offering a reward of US$100,000.