(Reuters) -Ecuador's attorney general's office has launched an investigation into the country's prisons agency after the killing of six suspects accused in the murder of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, the office said on Saturday.
Later in the morning the prisons agency announced a seventh death at another prison, also of a suspect in Villavicencio's death.
Violence - blamed by the government on drug gangs - has sharply increased in Ecuador in recent years, and the latest killings seemed to underline rising lawlessness.
Prosecutors said they initiated the investigation because the agency, SNAI, did not carry out a pending order to transfer for security reasons the six inmates killed at the Litoral Penitentiary on Friday.
Villavicencio, a prominent journalist who exposed corruption and organized crime, was gunned down while leaving a campaign event in August. Police arrested six people that day and one suspect was killed. Another seven suspects were later arrested.
President Guillermo Lasso was meeting with his security cabinet on Saturday and cancelled an upcoming trip to South Korea to "address the crisis in the penitentiary system," according to his official social media account. The government has previously promised to identify the intellectual authors of Villavicencio's murder.
The Colombian government condemned the killings and offered its support to Ecuadorean investigators in a statement on Saturday.
Villavicencio built his career on exposing corruption by politicians and business leaders and soon before his death had denounced both the Albanian mafia and a leader of the Los Choneros gang who goes by his alias Fito.
The minister of the interior said on Friday that an investigative police report into Villavicencio's killing was ready. The report is not yet public.
The second round run-off vote will be held on Oct. 15.
Both candidates, business heir Daniel Noboa, who is narrowly leading polls, and leftist Luisa Gonzalez, have demanded the government clarify information about the prison killings.
(Reporting by Anna-Catherine Brigida and Julia Symmes Cobb, Editing by Franklin Paul)
