🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summaryOct 6 (Reuters) - Six men suspected of involvement in the murder in August of Ecuador’s anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio were killed in prison on Friday, the prisons agency said, barely a week before a crucial run-off election. The killings took place in a penitentiary in Guayaquil, the South American country’s largest city, the attorney general’s office announced earlier on Friday. Outgoing President Guillermo Lasso pledged “neither complicity nor cover-up” in getting to the bottom of the killings, in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. Villavicencio, a prominent journalist, was gunned down less than two weeks before a first round general election as he left a campaign event in the capital, Quito. The second round run-off vote is scheduled for Oct. 15, the culmination of an election cycle marred by numerous incidents of violence. Business heir Daniel Noboa, who holds a narrow lead in some polls ahead of the run-off, said in a social media post that the government must provide details of what occurred at the prison and that peace must be restored in the country. — Saved 39% of original text.