Colombia’s top drug lord caught
Print Edition
Colombia’s most-wanted drug trafficker “Otoniel” has been captured, officials said on Saturday, a major victory for the government of the world’s top cocaine exporter.
Dairo Antonio Usuga, who headed the country’s largest narco-trafficking gang — known as the Gulf Clan — was captured near one of his main outposts in Necocli, near the border with Panama.
Images released by the government showed the 50-year-old Otoniel in handcuffs and surrounded by soldiers.
“This is the hardest strike to drug trafficking in our country this century,” president Ivan Duque said in a message, adding that the arrest was “only comparable to the fall of Pablo Escobar,” the notorious Colombian narco-trafficking kingpin.
Some 500 soldiers backed by 22 helicopters were deployed in the Necocli municipality to carry out the operation, which left one police officer dead.
It was “the biggest penetration of the jungle ever seen in the military history of our country,” Duque said.
A live broadcast by police later showed a handcuffed Otoniel landing in Bogota before being taken into custody under heavy security.
Colombia’s police chief Jorge Vargas told reporters that authorities carried out “an important satellite operation with agencies of the United States and the United Kingdom.”
Fearful of authorities, he “slept there in the rain, never approaching inhabited areas,” Vargas said.
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