Was the son of fugitive Mexican druglord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman foolish enough to give away his father’s hideout on Twitter?
An Aug. 31 tweet in an account purportedly belonging to Guzman’s son, Alfredo, featured a picture appearing to show the pair at a restaurant, with Twitter’s geolocator placing them in “Costa Rica.”
A huge emoticon of a big nose with glasses and mustache covered the top of the face of a portly man whose black mustache and chin resemble that of the Sinaloa drug cartel kingpin. Another man is also seen in the picture.
The picture on the account @AlfreditoGuzma was accompanied by this taunt: “You know who I am seen with.”
This set off a frenzy of speculation that Joaquin Guzman, who escaped a maximum-security prison outside Mexico City on July 11, had snuck into Costa Rica.
The Mexican attorney general’s office would only say on Tuesday that it was investigating the authenticity of the tweet.
However, Costa Rican authorities voiced doubts that Joaquin Guzman, 58, was relaxing in their country.
Instead, they said, he is probably in another “Costa Rica”: The town of Costa Rica, Sinaloa, which is Guzman’s home state.
“It’s over there in Sinaloa. We have no information that this boy, the son of El Chapo, is in the country,” Costa Rican judicial police director Gerald Campos told reporters.
Two US Drug Enforcement Administration officials in July said that following his jailbreak, Joaquin Guzman probably scurried to his Sinaloa mountain stronghold, where he enjoys the protection of the local population.
Joaquin Guzman has been in Central America before: He was captured for the first time in Guatemala in 1993.
He broke out of another Mexican prison in 2001 and was caught 13 years later in Mazatlan, a tourist resort on Sinaloa’s Pacific coast.
His July escape, in which he crawled through a hole leading to a huge tunnel under his cell shower, was a major embarrassment to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration.
Seven officials, including two prison workers and two intelligence service employees, have been charged over the escape while a US$3.8 million reward is being offered for his arrest.
Meanwhile, the account holder of @AlfreditoGuzma seems to be amused by all the attention, retweeting news reports about the photograph. A new picture on Tuesday shows a young man whose left eye is covered by the same type of emoticon used in the earlier picture.
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