Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Tag: hostage situation
-
Hundreds of Americans remain stranded in Gaza
Hundreds of Americans remain stranded in Gaza – CBS News
-
New details emerge on release of 2 American hostages
New details emerge on release of 2 American hostages – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
-
Family member of slain Israelis speaks out
Family member of slain Israelis speaks out – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
-
Hamas releases video of Israeli hostage, mother pleads for release
Hamas releases video of Israeli hostage, mother pleads for release – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
-
10/15: CBS Weekend News
10/15: CBS Weekend News – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
-
Prisoners in Ecuador take 57 guards and police hostage as car bombs rock the capital
Ecuador’s was rocked by a series of car bombings and the hostage-taking of more than 50 law enforcement officers inside various prisons Thursday, just weeks after the country was shaken by the assassination of a presidential candidate. Ecuador’s National Police reported no injuries resulting from the four explosions in Quito, the capital, and in a province that borders Peru, while Interior Minister Juan Zapata said none of the law enforcement officers taken hostage in six different prisons had been injured.
Authorities said the brazen actions were the response of criminal groups to the relocation of various inmates and other measures taken by the country’s corrections system. The crimes happened three weeks after the slaying of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP via Getty
The corrections system, known as the National Service for Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty, has in recent years lost control of large prisons, which have been the site of violent riots resulting in dozens of deaths. It has taken to transferring inmates to manage gang-related disputes.
In Quito, the first bomb went off Wednesday night in an area where an office of the country’s corrections system was previously located. The second explosion in the capital happened early Thursday outside the agency’s current base.
Ecuador National Police Gen. Pablo Ramírez, the national director of anti-drug investigations, told reporters on Thursday that police found gas cylinders, fuel, fuses and blocks of dynamite among the debris of the crime scenes in Quito, where the first vehicle to explode was a small car and the second was a pickup truck.
Authorities said gas tanks were used in the explosions in the El Oro communities of Casacay and Bella India.
The fire department in the city of Cuenca, where one of the prisons in which law enforcement officers are being held hostage is located, reported that an explosive device went off Thursday night. The department did not provide additional details beyond saying the explosion damaged a car.
Zapata said seven of prison hostages are police officers and the rest are prison guards. In a video shared on social media, which Zapata identified as authentic, a police officer who identifies himself as Lt. Alonso Quintana asks authorities “not to make decisions that violate the rights of persons deprived of their liberty.” He can be seen surrounded by a group of police and corrections officers and says that about 30 people are being held by the inmates.
Ecuadorian authorities attribute the country’s spike in violence over the past three years to a power vacuum triggered by the killing in 2020 of Jorge Zambrano, alias “Rasquiña” or “JL,” the leader of the local Los Choneros gang. Members carry out contract killings, run extortion operations, move and sell drugs, and rule prisons.
Los Choneros and similar groups linked to Mexican and Colombian cartels are fighting over drug-trafficking routes and control of territory, including within detention facilities, where at least 400 inmates have died since 2021.
Villavicencio, the presidential candidate, had a famously tough stance on organized crime and corruption. He was killed Aug. 9 at the end of a political rally in Quito despite having a security detail that included police and bodyguards.
He had accused Los Choneros and its imprisoned current leader Adolfo Macías, alias “Fito,” whom he linked to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, of threatening him and his campaign team days before the assassination.
Ecuador’s Security Secretary, Wagner Bravo, told FMundo radio station that six prisoners who were relocated may have been involved in Villavicencio’s slaying.
The mayor of Quito, Pabel Muñoz, told the Teleamazonas television station that he was hoping “for justice to act quickly, honestly and forcefully.”
“We are not going to give up. May peace, calm and security prevail among the citizens,” Muñoz said.
The country’s National Police tallied 3,568 violent deaths in the first six months of this year, far more than the 2,042 reported during the same period in 2022. That year ended with 4,600 violent deaths, the country’s highest in history and double the total in 2021.
The port city of Guayaquil has been the epicenter of violence, but Esmeraldas, a Pacific coastal city, is also considered one of the country’s most dangerous. There, six government vehicles were set on fire earlier this week, according to authorities.
-
Indigenous group holds dozens of tourists hostage, including Americans, in Peruvian Amazon oil spill protest
Angela Ramirez/Facebook
A group of Indigenous people in Peru’s Amazon region has taken dozens of foreign and Peruvian tourists hostage as they made their way through the area on river tour boat. The Indigenous group says it took the action to protest the lack of government aid following an oil spill in the area, according to local media and members of the tour group.
“(We want) to call the government’s attention with this action, there are foreigners and Peruvians, there are about 70 people,” Watson Trujillo Acosta, the leader of the Cuninico community, told the country’s national RPP radio network.
The tourists include citizens from the United States, Spain, France, the U.K. and Switzerland.
Lon Haldeman, one of the Americans held captive, said in a statement shared with CBS News on Friday by his wife that the group had been held “for the past 26 hours.”
He said that the hostage-takers were demanding “medical help and clean water and food” after an oil spill in the area “contaminated the wells and river.”
“The villagers are peaceful toward us but they did take over the boat with spears and clubs,” Haldeman said in the statement. “No one had guns. We were parked near an island last night and the villagers took the battery from the boat motor. The captain and drivers are being held in a village jail. The village wants to keep the big boat for ransom. We might get some small rescue boats. There is new action every hour.”
Angela Ramirez, a Peruvian national who said she was among the hostages, said in a Facebook post on Thursday afternoon that there were children, pregnant women and disabled people among those seized on the boat.
Ramirez also said the Indigenous community was treating them with kindness and respect, adding that holding the tourists was “the only way they have found to look for solutions for their community” after oil spills that allegedly led to the deaths of two children and one woman.
“The sooner they are heard, the sooner they will let us go,” said Ramirez in the online post. “Help me help them be heard.”
Acosta said his group had taken the “radical measure” in an effort to put pressure on the government to send a delegation to assess the environmental damage from a September 16 incident that spilled 2,500 tons of crude oil into the Cuninico River. He said the detainees would spend the night inside the vessel while awaiting a resolution to the situation.
Susan Notorangelo, Haldeman’s wife, told CBS News her husband had been sending sporadic updates to let her know he was OK, but not responding to many questions, which she suspected was an effort to conserve battery power on his iPad. Notorangelo said she had been told the U.S. State Department was sending a boat with food and water, but didn’t believe it had yet arrived at the remote location.
Haldeman is a tour guide, but was not running the tour that was detained. Notorangelo said her husband and the other tourists were supposed to have ended their boat ride at noon on Thursday and then ridden bikes to the nearby town of Iquitos. She said her husband has an airline ticket to leave Peru on Tuesday, and hopes he and the other hostages will be released in time for him to make the flight.
Ramirez told RPP that the Cuninico community had said it was prepared to hold the hostages for six to eight days, until it receives a response from the government.
She said they were “physically fine,” but in a new post on Friday morning she said the sun was strong, babies were crying and they were almost out of water.
Local media indicated no public comment from the Peruvian government or police on the incident, which took place on a tributary of the Maranon River.
Getty
Indigenous communities had already been blocking the transit of all vessels on the river in protest against the spill, which was caused by a rupture in the Norperuano oil pipeline.
On September 27, the government declared a 90-day state of emergency in the impacted region, which is home to about 2,500 members of the Cuninico and Urarinas communities.
The roughly 500-mile-long Norperuano pipeline, owned by the state-run Petroperu, was built four decades ago to transport crude oil from the Amazon region to the ports of Piura, on the coast.
According to Petroperu, the spill was the result of an eight-inch cut made deliberately in the pipeline, which the company said had suffered over a dozen similar attacks in the past.
CBS News’ Maddie Richards and April Alexander contributed to this report.
-
Venezuela releases 7 jailed Americans; U.S. frees 2 prisoners
Venezuela on Saturday freed seven Americans imprisoned in the South American country in exchange for the release of two nephews of President Nicholas Maduro’s wife who had been jailed for years by the United States on drug smuggling convictions, a senior U.S. official said.
The swap of the Americans, including five oil executives held for nearly five years, is the largest trade of detained citizens ever carried out by the Biden administration.
“We are relieved and gratified to be welcoming back to their families today seven Americans who had been wrongfully detained for too long in Venezuela,” said Joshua Geltzer, the deputy homeland security adviser.
It amounts to a rare gesture of goodwill by Maduro as the socialist leader looks to rebuild relations with the U.S. after vanquishing most of his domestic opponents. The deal follows months of back channel diplomacy by Washington’s top hostage negotiator and other U.S. officials — secretive talks with a major oil producer that took on greater urgency after sanctions on Russia put pressure on global energy prices.
Those freed include five employees of Houston-based Citgo — Tomeu Vadell, Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Zambrano, Jorge Toledo and Jose Pereira — who were lured to Venezuela right before Thanksgiving in 2017 to attend a meeting at the headquarters of the company’s parent, state-run-oil giant PDVSA. Once there, they were hauled away by masked security agents who busted into a Caracas conference room.
Also released was Matthew Heath, a former U.S. Marine corporal from Tennessee who was arrested in 2020 at a roadblock in Venezuela on what the State Department has called “specious” weapons charges, and Florida man, Osman Khan, who was arrested in January.
The United States freed Franqui Flores and his cousin Efrain Campo nephews of “First Combatant” Cilia Flores, as Maduro has called his wife. The men were arrested in Haiti in a Drug Enforcement Administration sting in 2015 and immediately taken to New York to face trial. They were convicted the following year in a highly charged case that cast a hard look at U.S. accusations of drug trafficking at the highest levels of Maduro’s administration.
Both men were granted clemency by President Joe Biden before the release.
The Biden administration has been under pressure to do more to bring home the roughly 60 Americans it believes are held hostage abroad or wrongfully detained by hostile foreign governments. While much of the focus is on Russia, where the U.S. has so far tried unsuccessfully to secure the release of WNBA star Brittney Griner and another American, Paul Whelan, Venezuela has been holding the largest contingent of Americans suspected of being used as bargaining chips.
At least four other Americans remain detained in Venezuela, including two former Green Berets involved in a slapdash attempt to oust Maduro in 2019, and two other men who, like Khan, were detained for allegedly entering the country illegally from neighboring Colombia.
Earlier this month, the family of Los Angeles attorney Eyvin Hernandez told CBS News that the 44-year-old took a trip to Colombia in April and never returned. They said he and a friend went to the Colombia-Venezuela border to get a passport stamp, but things went awry and the two were detained.
The two were charged with conspiracy and association to commit crimes against the state, and Hernandez’s brother told CBS News he has had little communication with his family since he was imprisoned.
The Biden administration did not release another prisoner long sought by Maduro: Alex Saab, an insider businessman who Venezuela considers a diplomat and U.S. prosecutors a corrupt regime enabler. Saab fought extradition from Cape Verde, where he was arrested last year during a stopover en route to Iran, and is now awaiting trial in Miami federal court on charges of siphoning off millions in state contracts.
The oil executives were convicted of embezzlement last year in a trial marred by delays and irregularities. They were sentenced to between eight years and 13 years in prison for a never-executed proposal to refinance billions in the oil company’s bonds. Maduro at the time accused them of “treason,” and Venezuela’s supreme court upheld their long sentences earlier this year.
The men have all pleaded not guilty and the State Department has regarded them — and the two other Americans freed on Saturday — as wrongfully detained.
Earlier this year, two American citizens who the U.S. considered unjustly detained were released from a Venezuelan prison. Gustavo Cardenas, one of the detained Citgo executives, and tourist Jorge Fernandez returned to the U.S. in early March.
