QUITO, Ecuador — An Ecuadorean judge Tuesday ordered the arrest of 16 soldiers charged with the disappearance of four children who went missing three weeks ago in the coastal city of Guayaquil.
A request to detain the soldiers was made by Ecuador's Attorney General's office. In a statement on X the law enforcement agency said its request had been granted, adding that the detained soldiers would be transferred from a military base to a prison.
The case of the missing children has shaken Ecuador, a nation where the military has been increasingly deployed to patrol cities and fight drug gangs amid growing levels of violence.
The children, aged 11 to 15, were reported missing by their parents on Dec. 8, after they went to play soccer in a working-class sector of Guayaquil and did not return home.
A video taken by a security camera shows a military patrol taking two of the children into the back of a pickup truck and driving off with them.
Ecuador's military has admitted the children were in its custody and claimed they were arrested because they were participating in a robbery attempt.
The military says the children were released on the same night they were detained and that gangs are to blame for their disappearance.
Meanwhile, detectives last week found four charred bodies near a military base on the outskirts of Guayaquil. On Tuesday afternoon, the Attorney General's office said that genetic tests conducted on the bodies, whose faces and fingerprints were unrecognizable, determined that the corpses were those of the missing children.
