LIMA, PERU — It started as a routine vehicle check. At roughly 9:30 p.m. on May 21, 2025, officers from Peru’s SUAT — the National Police’s Urban Operations Division — moved in on a suspicious vehicle on Lima’s Vía Expresa highway, intending nothing more than to verify who was inside.

The occupants, however, had other plans. Instead of stopping, they rammed other vehicles on the highway and then opened fire directly on the approaching officers.

What followed was captured in real time by the agents’ own body-worn cameras — footage that’s now circulating virally across the hemisphere more than a year later.

Lima’s SUAT officers, each kitted out with ballistic helmets, body armor, rifles and sidearms, returned a volley of fire — what police described as precision shots — working to neutralize the threat while staying mindful of civilian traffic still moving around them on the highway.

When the shooting stopped, two gang members were dead: Giancarlo “Cuarto de Pollo” Huamán Cornejo and Alexander “Moñongo” Alvarado Zevallos.

A third suspect, Eduardo Quiñones del Piélago — known as “Kevin” — was wounded and captured; he now faces charges including attempted homicide and illegal weapons possession.

Three police officers were hit in the exchange, including Colonel Juan Carlos Montúfar, who took a bullet to the leg that lodged without hitting bone or an artery. He was treated and discharged, reportedly choosing to keep the bullet in place rather than undergo further surgery.

“Injertos del Centro”

The gang had built a violent reputation well before that night. Operating since at least 2021 across some of Lima’s most affluent districts — Lince, Jesús María, San Isidro, Surco, and Miraflores — the group specialized in stealing high-end SUVs, often swapping in altered license plates to slip past police checkpoints.

Investigators say the gang was carrying out as many as four armed robberies a day at the height of its activity, with a rap sheet that extended beyond theft into extortion, kidnapping, and murder.

Police had also linked the group to the April 2025 killing of police officer Ángel Belleza Zapata, who was shot while working private security in Miraflores — giving the Vía Expresa takedown added weight as a case investigators had been building toward for weeks.