Featured Image Credit: Cuyabeno TV
Topics: Crime, World News, UK News
Joe Harker
More information has come out in the case of a 'British' man who was lynched and burned alive in Ecuador.
The man had been in an Ecuadorian police station after being accused of murder before being dragged out of the building and violently killed by a crowd of locals.
He had been arrested in connection with the fatal shooting of a man named Rodrigo Chavez on 20 April, and while he was in custody in Sucumbíos - an area on the country's border with Colombia - an armed group of around 200 people stormed the building and dragged him out.
The man is thought to have died around six hours after he was seized by the mob, with the police saying in a statement that officers did not have the numbers to intervene and had faced threats from the crowd to burn down the entire building.
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They said: "The police did everything humanly possible to safeguard the person who had been apprehended over the shooting.
"Unfortunately the size of the mob exceeded the capacities of the seven police officers who were at the scene.
"There had been problems between the two men that died. The man we believe to be British had shot a local man, causing his death."
According to the Daily Mail, the man was named locally as Michael Hann. He had allegedly fallen out with his business partner - Chavez - when their travel company started having financial problems.
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The Mail reports that Chavez accused Hann of taking customer's money and putting it into his own pocket instead of company accounts.
Hann allegedly shot Chavez dead while the man was 'drunk and half asleep' in the street after a night out, for which he was soon afterwards assaulted by locals before police arrived to arrest him.
The area is known for crime rates and Ecuadorean authorities announced that a state of emergency was in place after over 150 people were killed in the region in 2024.
While Hann and Chavez may have set up a travel company, the UK's Foreign Office advises against 'all but essential travel' to the region and the areas around the border between Ecuador and Colombia.
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They cite 'the presence of organised crime linked to the production and trafficking of drugs' as a reason for people to steer well clear of the area, and of course the deaths of these two men are another couple added to the toll.
LADbible has contacted the Foreign Office for further comment.