Luz Marina Delgado had participated in the capture of alias Gerald’s partner
By
Yalilé LoaizaFrom Quito
The prosecutor was traveling in a red vehicle with a lawyer when she was intercepted by the gunmen who killed her.
The prosecutor Luz Marina Delgado and the lawyer Jeferson Mendoza were murdered by hired assassins in Manta, 420 kilometers from Quito. The agent of the State Attorney General’s Office participated, in 2018, in an operation that allowed the capture of Washington Prado’s partner, known as ‘alias Gerald’ or the ‘Ecuadorian Pablo Escobar’.< /p>
Delgado and Mendoza were traveling in a red vehicle that lost control and crashed into the wall of a house after its occupants were hit by bullets.
The residents of the sector told the press that they heard a burst of gunfire. As soon as the incident was known, members of the National Police and intelligence agents arrived at the scene. Likewise, medical personnel treated the victims and confirmed their death.
The murder of the prosecutor Delgado is a new attack against the officials of the Prosecutor’s Office, since other agents have also died under the modality of hired assassins. This month the murder of an agent was also reported in Santo Domingo, 152 kilometers from Quito, as a result of a shootout. In Esmeraldas, on Ecuador’s northern border, a former prosecutor was also killed.
The State Attorney General’s Office issued a statement where it assured the start of investigations to clarify the crime, which it described as “execrable”. The institution rejected the attempts to intimidate its officials, whom they support in their investigative work, according to the bulletin.
The institution asked the National Police and other entities in charge of citizen security to act “with greater efficiency so that these types of events are not repeated”.
Image of prosecutor Luz Marina Delgado. (Photo: El Universo).
Delgado participated four years ago in the arrest of Julia J.M.G., partner of alias Gerald, who had an arrest warrant for investigative purposes for the crime of money laundering. Julia was arrested in a police operation on April 17, 2018. As a result of that operation, the authorities seized USD 7,000 in cash and a cell phone.
The capture , in which Delgado intervened, happened three days after Julia J. M. G. will regain her freedom thanks to a favorable ruling by a court of judges and after having been in jail for the crime of organized crime. The judges were prosecuted for prevarication.
At the beginning of May, the lawyer Walter Vallejo, who defended alias Gerald, was executed by a hitman in front of the entrance of a luxurious hotel in Guayaquil. According to the testimony of a person who accompanied Vallejo Pino, the criminal who shot the deceased was dressed in all black, got off a silver motorcycle and fled in the same vehicle with the complicity of another person who was driving the motorized.
The criminalist’s murder, as well as that of the prosecutor, happened during the state of emergency decreed by President Guillermo Lasso in Guayas, Manabí and Esmeraldas, for which the military and police patrol the streets .
Vallejo was a judicial sponsor of people involved in drug trafficking. He was part of the alias Gerald group of lawyers, who was arrested in 2017 by agents police from the United States and Colombia. Shortly after, he was extradited from Colombia to face the charges against him before the US justice system, where he was sentenced to 19 years in prison, after reaching a judicial cooperation agreement.
The drug trafficker owns 20 ships and speedboats with which he transported drugs to Mexico with the protection of the Sinaloa Cartel. During the raids on the properties of alias Gerald, the Ecuadorian Police found approximately USD 20 million kept in different hiding places.