BBC NEWS | Americas | Ecuador holds Colombia ‘plotters’

Police in Ecuador have arrested three Colombians and an Ecuadorian accused of plotting to kill the country’s leftist president Rafael Correa, officials say.

Police were questioning the men after their arrest in the capital Quito, said Attorney General Washington Pezantes.

The men were found with photos of the presidential palace and maps of nearby streets, local media reported.

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Mr Correa, a critic of Washington and ally of Venezuela’s left-wing president, Hugo Chavez, had been informed of the plot, Mr Pezantes said. “We don’t know the particular details (of the plot), we only know that there were foreigners with contracts to attack the president,” he said.

But Mr Correa raised the possibility that the plot was the work of conmen seeking to extort cash out of the authorities.

“It was a tip that we have been following for some time, but there is a strong probability they were just scam artists,” he told local television.

That strikes me as a calm, reasonable response, insofar as despite recent tensions with Colombia, Correa appears (at least from this quote) to be trying to diffuse the situation. I can’t image the government of Colombia sending in assassins nor can I think of a private organization in Colombia which would be interested in taking out Correa. I suppose that they could be freelancers hired by anti-Correa forces within Ecuador.

Even the conmen angle would be odd, given that I am not sure how threatening to kill the president could be used to extort money from authorities.

Developing, as they say.