Connect with us

Published

on

An Ecuadorian journalist who was held at gunpoint live on air has told Sky News how his attackers threatened to kill him if police arrived.

Jose Luis Calderon said the masked gunmen also placed an improvised explosive in his jacket pocket during the terrifying ordeal at TC Television’s studios in Guayaquil on Tuesday night.

The incident took place after one of the country’s most notorious drug gang bosses escaped from prison, sparking Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa to declare a 60-day state of emergency.

In footage of the incident, which was broadcast live on the TC network, Mr Calderon was seen attempting to plead with the masked gunmen, one of whom pushed a gun to his neck.

“They kept on repeating, ‘if the police come in, we’ll kill you’,” he told Sky News.

“It was a really chaotic moment, but in that instant, I kept my calm. You’ve seen the pictures, I’m calm, looking as if I’m praying, asking them not to go too far.

“There was no explanation about what was happening at that moment.

“The news programme was on air and that’s why you were able to see the footage. You could see what was happening when they pointed a gun at me, they put an explosive in my jacket pocket.

“They were really unnerving moments, but at the same time, I managed to stay calm.”

Hooded gunmen have burst onto a live TV set in Ecuador.
Image:
Pic: TC Television

Live television images broadcast on Tuesday showed hooded people inside Ecuador's TC television station in Guayaquil, some of whom were seen waving guns.
Image:
Pic: TC Television

Mr Calderon said he was not initially on air at the time the masked gunmen burst into the studio, and first became aware that there was an issue when he heard people shouting.

He and two colleagues attempted to hide in a nearby bathroom.

“We were hidden in there for a few minutes,” he said.

“We managed to speak to our relatives and warn the police about what was happening without knowing the exact details of what was going on and who was behind it.”

He said the gunmen discovered where they were hiding and ordered them to come out.

“We saw that they were hooded men, with big military-type guns, pistols, revolvers, there was even a machete,” he said.

“They made threats constantly. My colleagues were touched inappropriately.

“They led us to the studio, which was still live on air. When we arrived, just metres away there were colleagues, people working for the channel who were on the floor, very worried, on their knees, and they took us hostage.”

Hooded man points a gun at Ecuadorian TV presenter Jose Luis Calderon. Pic: TC television station
Image:
Hooded man points a gun at Ecuadorian TV presenter Jose Luis Calderon. Pic: TC Television

Read more world news from Sky News:

Peregrine Mission-1 spacecraft has ‘no chance’ of landing on moon
International rugby star jailed for sexual offences

Mr Calderon said at one point a gunman shouted to say that they “had to kill one” of the hostages.

“People were very worried. In my case, I’ve been a journalist for 23 years, including in the field.

“I’ve covered events like this, and I’ve seen tragic events – but I’ve never been part of one.”

Mr Calderon said the gunmen, who he described as a group of “armed kids”, wanted him to communicate a message on the television, but it was not clear what they wanted him to say.

He said when police arrived and began shooting, the group dispersed and were eventually captured by police.

People accused of invading and taking over television station TC with weapons and forcing staff to lie and sit down, lie handcuffed on the floor in a police handout, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, January 9, 2024. Ecuadorean Police/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES
Image:
Ecuador’s national police service shared images of people detained by officers following the incident

People accused of invading and taking over television station TC with weapons and forcing staff to lie and sit down, lie handcuffed on the floor in a police haundout, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, January 9, 2024. Ecuadorean Police/Handout via REUTERS THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES

“We’re grateful that we’re alive. This is completely unheard of, for this sort of thing to happen on TV, for someone to threaten us on our property,” Mr Calderon said.

“The message that they wanted to send was just chaos. Here we are to impose ourselves above the law.”

Mr Calderon said that despite the incident – which he described as a “terrorist attack” – the people of Ecuador should keep “faith in the work” of the armed forces and police.

“There’s fear that another situation like this could happen. We’re hoping for action to be taken to guarantee our safety,” he said.

“My life was at risk, as well as my colleagues. I’ve never seen a situation like this.

“But we should have faith in the work of the armed forces. The police and the armed forces are in a position that allows them to take action against any situation.”

Following the incident, Ecuador’s attorney general’s office said 13 people had been arrested for breaking into the studio and were set to be charged with terrorism offences.

The charge holds a penalty of up to 13 years in prison under Ecuadorian law, if convicted.

Members of military stand guard near the Presidential Palace (Palacio de Carondelet), following the disappearance of Jose Adolfo Macias, alias 'Fito', leader of the Los Choneros criminal group, in Quito, Ecuador, January 9, 2024. REUTERS/Karen Toro
Image:
Members of military stand guard near the Presidential Palace after the declaration of a state of emergency

A state of emergency has been declared in Ecuador Pic: AP
Image:
Pic: AP

National police commander Cesar Zapata told the TV channel Teleamazonas that officers seized a number of guns and explosives at the scene.

The incident took place a day after Mr Noboa, the son of one of Ecuador’s richest men, who took office in November promising to stem a wave of drug-related violence on the streets and in prisons, declared a state of emergency.

The declaration was made after drug lord, Adolfo Macias – also known as Fito – was reported missing from his cell on Sunday.

The leader of the Los Choneros gang was serving a 34-year sentence in La Regional prison for drug trafficking and murder.

The leader of the powerful Los Choneros gang, Jose Adolfo Macias, alias 'Fito' Pic: Ecuadorean Armed Forces
Image:
The leader of the powerful Los Choneros gang, Jose Adolfo Macias, alias ‘Fito’. Pic: Ecuadorean Armed Forces

His reported escape occurred on the same day he was scheduled to be transferred to a maximum security facility in the city of Guayaquil.

Ecuador‘s prosecutors have filed charges against two prison guards as part of their investigation into the alleged escape.

Los Choneros is one of the gangs authorities consider responsible for a spike in violence that reached new heights last year with the assassination of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Interview conducted by Andrew Connell, deputy foreign news editor.

Continue Reading

World

Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Published

on

By

Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Continue Reading

World

Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Published

on

By

Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Image:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Image:
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off

These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
Image:
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Image:
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

Continue Reading

World

Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy’s home city

Published

on

By

Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy's home city

At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.

Ukraine’s president said Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih showed Russia “does not want a ceasefire”.

“The whole world sees it,” said Mr Zelenskyy.

“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.

“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.

Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.

Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.

Latest updates: President’s home city hit by missile attack

Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.

They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.

Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.

“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
Image:
Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
Image:
Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’

It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.

Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.

“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.

Read more:
Israeli troops expand ‘security zone’ in northern Gaza
UK in talks with Brazil over ‘potential sale’ of warships

In March, the US agreed a proposed 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia. Later, Washington negotiated a limited ceasefire about energy infrastructure with Russia.

Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.

He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.

“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.

Continue Reading

Trending