Ecuador’s attorney general’s office has confirmed that incinerated bodies found on Christmas Eve belong to the four children missing since early December, in a case posing a severe challenge to President Daniel Noboa’s “war on drugs”.
The four boys – all black, aged between 11 and 15, and residents of Las Malvinas, a poor area in the country’s largest city, Guayaquil – were returning from a football game on 8 December when they were apprehended by 16 air force soldiers.
