Assassins disguised as police officers were captured in footage storming a football pitch in Ecuador before killing three gang rivals with assault rifles.
The distressing clip showed nine men playing a game of football when five hitmen dressed as cops emerged onto the pitch at around 9.30pm on January 7.
Realising something is wrong, the players drop to the ground to lie on their fronts, desperately trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
The assassins quickly sift through the players using powerful torches and single out their target – a man dressed in black in the middle of the pitch.
The masked hitmen were seen in the chilling footage kicking him as he lay helpless on the grass, before one of the killers shot him dead at point-blank range in front of the other players.
Just moments later, the gunmen dash off as quickly as they arrived, as the surviving players slowly rise from the ground before leaving the victim’s body and fleeing the pitch.
The entire attack lasted just five minutes, and in the aftermath of the cold-blooded killing, two additional bodies were discovered in the surrounding area.
The murders were committed at a football pitch which formed part of a golf club complex in Isla Mocoli, an upmarket residential area near the town of Samborondon in Ecuador’s Guayas province.
The distressing clip showed nine men playing a game of football when five hitmen dressed as cops emerged onto the pitch at around 9:30pm on January 7
Realising something is wrong, the players drop to the ground to lie on their fronts, desperately trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves
The masked hitmen were seen in the chilling footage kicking him as he lay helpless on the grass, before one of the killers shot him dead at point-blank range in front of the other players
According to Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo, the attackers had overpowered the community’s security guards, tied them up, and stolen their weapons before carrying out the hit.
One of the victims was identified as Stalin Rolando Olivero Vargas, who went by the alias ‘Marino.’ He had previously been sentenced to six years in prison in 2011 for robbery.
The 40-year-old was believed to be the leader of the local organised crime gang Los Lagartos – meaning The Lizards.
The other two men killed apart from Vargas were well-known to police and had previous convictions for crimes including illegal weapons possession, murder, and drug trafficking.
Ecuador’s Interior Minister John Reimberg described the incident as a targeted attack and confirmed the victims had been invited to use the football pitch, and the three men killed all had criminal records.
Police probing the murders are understood to have discovered Vargas may have been targeted by members of his own gang after initiating talks with another rival criminal organisation about a switch.
Mr Reimberg told a local TV station in an interview in the aftermath of the killings: ‘The man known by his nickname of Marino was the leader of a criminal organisation called Los Lagartos.
‘From what we have been able to establish so far, he appeared to have made contact with a gang called Los Lobos, and that meant betraying his own group, which could obviously have led to a settling of scores.
‘None of the men killed lived on the residential estate where the murders took place. They had been invited there by someone whose name we are not making public at the moment.’
On December 17, footballer Mario Pineida, who played for Ecuador nine times between 2014 and 2021, was gunned down alongside his Peruvian girlfriend Guisella Fernandez in a targeted attack outside a butcher’s in the north of Guayaquil.
The 33-year-old could be seen putting his hands up in the air before one of the two motorbike-riding assassins started firing at him from close range.
The other, who had a motorcycle helmet on to cover his face, targeted the woman with Pineida, who was initially thought to be his wife Ana Aguilar, before it emerged the victim was his 39-year-old new partner.
The footballer’s mum was also hurt but not seriously.
Pineida, a full-back for Ecuador’s Serie A side Barcelona Sporting Club, whose previous teams have included Brazilian top-flight team Fluminense, where he played on loan in 2022, had driven the two women to the shop to buy a pork shank for a family Christmas meal.
Ecuador has transformed from one of South America’s safest nations to one of its most violent in under a decade as it became a hub of the drug trade to Europe.
The country’s growing role in international drug trafficking and competition between criminal groups has been linked to this violence.
Large outbreaks of prison violence, often involving rival gangs, have also contributed.
