Five severed human heads were found hanging from ropes on a beach in southwestern Ecuador Sunday in a gruesome display linked to ongoing gang violence sweeping across the country, according to reports.

The killings came amid a wave of bloody violence tied to drug trafficking and organized crime, which has surged across Ecuador in recent years.

The Associated Press reported that the grim discovery underscores the tactics used by criminal groups competing for control of territory and trafficking routes, especially along the country’s coastline.

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Police said the heads were found on a tourist beach in the small fishing port of Puerto Lopez, in Manabi province.

The images shared by Ecuadorian media and on social media showed the severed heads tied with ropes to wooden poles planted in the sand, with blood visible at the scene.

A wooden sign left beside the heads carried a threatening message aimed at alleged extortionists targeting local fishermen.

The message warned those demanding so-called “vaccine cards” protection payments commonly extorted by gangs that they had been identified, the report said.

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Authorities said the display was likely the result of a conflict between criminal groups operating in the area.

Drug-trafficking networks with links to transnational cartels are active along Ecuador’s coast and have used fishermen and their small boats to transport illicit shipments, according to local police.

President Daniel Noboa launched an armed campaign against gangs and declared states of emergency in several provinces, including Manabi, deploying the military to support police operations.

Despite his efforts, violence has continued to escalate with police increasing patrols and surveillance in Puerto Lopez following recent massacres in the province, the Associated Press said.

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In 2025, at least nine people, including a baby, were killed there in an attack that authorities blamed on clashes between local gangs also.

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As previously reported by Fox News Digital, in 2025, infighting between factions of a gang vying for control over territory in Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, left nearly two dozen people dead.

Ecuador ended the year with a record homicide rate of 52 per 100,000 people, according to the Organized Crime Observatory, making it the deadliest year on record.

The United Nations’s top court is set to open a landmark case accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against its mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.

The trial on Monday is the first genocide case that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will take up in full in more than a decade, and its outcome will have repercussions beyond Myanmar, likely affecting South Africa’s petition against Israel over its genocidal war on Gaza.

The hearings will start at 09:00 GMT on Monday and span three weeks.

The Gambia filed the case against Myanmar at the ICJ, also known as the World Court, in 2019, two years after the country’s military launched an offensive that forced some 750,000 Rohingya from their homes and into neighbouring Bangladesh.

The refugees recounted mass killings, rape and arson attacks.

A UN fact-finding mission at the time concluded that the 2017 offensive had included “genocidal acts”. But authorities in Myanmar rejected the report, saying its military offensive was a legitimate counterterrorism campaign in response to attacks by alleged Rohingya armed groups.

“The case is likely to ‍set critical precedents for how genocide is defined and how it can be proven, and how violations can be remedied,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, told the Reuters news agency.

‘Renewed hope’

In Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, Rohingya refugees said they hoped the genocide case would help bring justice.

“We want justice and peace,” said 37-year-old Janifa Begum, a mother of two. “Our women lost their dignity when the military junta launched the eviction. They burned villages, killed men, and women became victims of widespread violence.”

Others said they hoped the case would bring them real change, even though the ICJ has no way to enforce any judgement it might make.

“I hope the ICJ will bring some solace to the deep wounds we are still carrying,” said Mohammad Sayed Ullah, 33, a former teacher and now a member of the United Council of Rohingya, a refugee organisation.

“The perpetrators must be held accountable and punished,” he said. “The sooner and fairer the trial is, the better the outcome will be… then the repatriation process may begin.”

Wai Wai Nu, the head of Myanmar’s Women’s Peace Network, said the start of the trial “delivers renewed hope to Rohingya that our decades-long suffering may finally end”.

“Amid ongoing violations against the Rohingya, the world must stand firm in the pursuit of justice and a path toward ending impunity in Myanmar and restoring our rights.”

The hearings at the ICJ will mark the first time that Rohingya victims of the alleged atrocities will be heard by an international court, although those sessions will be closed to the public and the media for sensitivity and privacy reasons.

“If the ICJ finds Myanmar responsible under the Genocide Convention, it would mark a historic step in holding a state legally accountable for genocide,” said Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), a group that advocates for Rohingya rights.

Separate ICC case

During the preliminary hearings in the ICJ case in 2019, Myanmar’s then-leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, rejected The Gambia’s accusations of genocide as “incomplete and misleading”. She was later toppled by the military in a coup in 2021.

The power grab plunged Myanmar into chaos, with the military’s violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests sparking a nationwide armed rebellion.

While Myanmar’s military continues to deny the accusations of genocide, the opposition National Unity Government (NUG), established by elected lawmakers after the 2021 coup, said it has “accepted and welcomed” the jurisdiction of the ICJ, adding that it has “withdrawn all preliminary objections” previously submitted on the case.

In a statement ahead of the hearing, the NUG acknowledged the government’s failures, which it said “enabled grave atrocities” to take place against minority groups. It also acknowledged the name Rohingya, which the previous elected government, including Aung San Suu Kyi, had refused to do.

“We are committed to ensuring such crimes are never repeated,” the NUG said.

Myanmar’s military leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, is facing a separate arrest warrant before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for his role in the persecution of the Rohingya.

The ICC prosecution said the general “bears criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh.”

Additionally, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) has accused the military government of “intensifying genocide” against the Rohingya since taking power in 2021.

Myanmar is currently holding phased elections that have been criticised by the UN, some Western countries and human rights groups as not free or fair.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Already shaken by the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration officer, Minnesota’s Twin Cities on Sunday braced for what many expect will be a new normal over the next few weeks as the Department of Homeland Security carries out what it called its largest enforcement operation ever.

Protesters screamed at heavily-armed federal agents and honked car horns, banged on drums and blew whistles in attempts to disrupt their operations in one Minneapolis neighborhood filled with single-family homes.

There was some pushing and several people were hit with chemical spray just before agents banged down the door of one home on Sunday. They later took one man away in handcuffs.

“We’re seeing a lot of immigration enforcement across Minneapolis and across the state, federal agents just swarming around our neighborhoods,” said Jason Chavez, a Minneapolis city councilmember. “They’ve definitely been out here.”

Chavez, the son of Mexican immigrants who represents an area with a growing immigrant population, said he is closely monitoring information from chat groups about where residents are seeing agents operating.

People holding whistles positioned themselves in freezing temperatures on street corners in the neighborhood where 37-year-old Renee Good was shot and killed Wednesday, watching for any signs of federal agents.

More than 20,000 people have taken part in a variety of trainings to become “observers” of enforcement activities in Minnesota since the 2024 election, said Luis Argueta, a spokesperson for Unidos MN, a local human rights organization .

“It’s a role that people choose to take on voluntarily, because they choose to look out for their neighbors,” Argueta said.

The protests have been largely peaceful, but the Twin Cities remained anxious. Minneapolis public schools on Monday will start offering remote learning for the next month in response to concerns that children might feel unsafe venturing out while tensions remain high.

Many schools closed last week after Good’s shooting and the upheaval that followed.

While the enforcement activity continues, two of the state’s leading Democrats said on Sunday that the investigation into Good’s shooting death shouldn’t be overseen solely by the federal government.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and U.S. Sen. Tina Smith said in separate interviews Sunday that state authorities should be included in the investigation because the federal government has already made clear what it believes happened.

“How can we trust the federal government to do an objective, unbiased investigation, without prejudice, when at the beginning of that investigation they have already announced exactly what they saw — what they think happened,” Smith said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Trump administration has defended the officer who shot Good in her car, saying he was protecting himself and fellow agents and that Good had “weaponized” her vehicle.

Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, defended the officer on Fox News Channel’s “The Sunday Briefing.”

“That law enforcement officer had milliseconds, if not short time to make a decision to save his life and his other fellow agents,” he said.

Lyons also said the administration’s enforcement operations in Minnesota wouldn’t be needed “if local jurisdictions worked with us to turn over these criminally illegal aliens once they are already considered a public safety threat by the locals.”

The killing of Good by an ICE officer and the shooting of two people by federal agents in Portland, Oregon, led to dozens of protests across the country over the weekend.

Thousands of people marched Saturday in Minneapolis, where Homeland Security called its deployment of immigration officers in the Twin Cities its biggest ever immigration enforcement operation.

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Associated Press journalists Giovanna Dell’Orto in Minneapolis, Thomas Strong in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta, and John Seewer in Toledo, Ohio, contributed.