THIRTEEN inmates were killed and two others injured yesterday in yet another bloody fight in a notorious Ecuadoran prison, law enforcement officials said.

“Unfortunately, central command reports 13 (inmates) dead and two injured,” the South American country’s prison authority SNAI said on Twitter.

The incident took place at the same Bellavista prison in the town of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, about 80km from Quito, where 44 inmates were killed in a bloody brawl in May.

Prison officials, aided by the military and the police, were able to regain control of the facility, SNAI said.

Some 220 inmates escaped from the prison during the May riot, but most of them have been recaptured.

Vicious prison riots are common in prisons in Ecuador, where drug gangs are vying for control of trafficking routes.

Those rivalries sometimes explode into grisly violence behind bars, with some inmates hacked to death or beheaded with machetes. – AFP, July 19, 2022.