An alleged medicine king pin ‘comparable solely to Pablo Escobar’ has been extradited from Colombia to the USA.
Dairo Antonio Usuga David was pictured being taken aboard a aircraft by closely armed safety.
The handcuffed Colombian – referred to as ‘Otoniel’ – was walked out of an armoured police van and led alongside the runway guarded by navy personnel and law enforcement officials armed to the enamel.
He's considered the pinnacle of the dreaded Gulf Clan and had been the nation’s most wished drug lord earlier than he was captured in October final yr.
The Colombian President in contrast Usuga David to Escobar, the infamous former head of the Medellin drug cartel.
Ivan Duque added: ‘He isn't solely essentially the most harmful drug trafficker on the earth, however he's assassin of social leaders, abuser of boys, ladies and adolescents, a assassin of policemen’.
He congratulated Colombia’s navy leaders for guarding and capturing the previous rural warlord earlier than yesterday’s switch to the USA, the place he faces indictments in three federal courts.
The nation has confronted six a long time of a devastating conflict on medicine, thought to have resulted within the deaths of at the very least 260,000 folks.
Otoniel had stayed on the run for greater than a decade by paying off state officers and forming alliances with militants on the political left and proper.
However, sporting a helmet and a bulletproof vest yesterday, he was moved from a jail within the capital Bogota to a closely guarded navy transport air subject.
Extradition is considered one of many outcomes most feared by drug lords.
Otoniel trafficked between 180 and 200 tonnes of cocaine a yr, Colombian authorities declare.
‘This extradition exhibits no person is above the Colombian state,’ Mr Duque stated.
The 50-year-old can also be stated to be chargeable for the deaths of a whole bunch of members of Colombia’s safety forces.
He's wished in the USA for crimes together with drug trafficking, conspiracy and illegally possessing weapons.
Colombia abolished extradition to the USA in 1991 amid a terror marketing campaign of killings and bombings by drug cartels, however the observe was restored in 1997.
Officers say Otoniel was captured in an operation involving a whole bunch of males and virtually two dozen helicopters.
He later claimed to the Particular Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) tribunal that he had handed himself in.
The JEP was created below a 2016 peace cope with the now demobilized FARC insurgent group to strive former combatants and members of the navy.
Otoniel’s attorneys argued in opposition to his extradition and advised he ought to testify earlier than the JEP, confess his function in Colombia’s inner battle and reveal hyperlinks between the navy and unlawful armed teams.
He has lengthy been a fixture on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s most-wanted checklist, having first been indicted in 2009 on narcotics costs and for allegedly offering help to a far-right paramilitary group designated a terrorist group by the US authorities.
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