GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (Reuters) -Ecuador’s former Vice President Jorge Glas was returned to prison hours after he was temporarily evacuated for security reasons amid chaotic scenes inside the jail, the country’s prison authority said on Sunday.
Earlier in the day, Glas’ lawyer, Sonia Gabriela Vera, said the former vice president had been evacuated from La Roca prison after an attempt on his life by mutinying inmates. She said the government was responsible for the situation.
Prisoners caused incidents “in a clear strategy to destabilize order and peace in the country,” the Ecuadorian prison agency SNAI said in a statement published on X.
It added that Glas was taken back to prison after the armed forces carried out weapons and explosives control operations.
SNAI did not mention the assassination allegations, and did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Earlier, Glas’ lawyer Vera called for the United Nations and other international organizations to intervene after what she called an “attempted assassination” of Glas.
The attack “is the result of a State that has condemned him to danger, torture and slow death,” Vera said on X.
“His emergency evacuation confirms what we have denounced time and again: they are deliberately playing with his life,” Vera added. “If anything happens to him, it will be a crime of the State.”
Glas was arrested in April after Ecuadorean security forces stormed Mexico’s embassy in Quito, where he was holed up after seeking asylum.
While Glas’ supporters say the arrest is politically motivated, the ex-vice president has been convicted for corruption on two other occasions.
Glas also faces charges of misusing funds collected to aid reconstruction of coastal Manabi province after a devastating 2016 earthquake.
(Reporting by Yury Garcia in Guayaquil; Editing by Drazen Jorgic, Chris Reese and Kate Mayberry)
