A brutal drug lord with a US$2.5 million bounty on his head and reputed ties to right-wing militias died during clashes with security forces in southern Colombia, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Wednesday.
Pedro Oliverio Guerrero, also known as “The Knife,” led the so-called Popular Revolutionary Anti-Terrorist Army of Colombia that protected coca crops and drug trafficking routes in eastern Colombia, according to US officials.
Santos said Guerrero’s body was found near Puerto Alvira in Meta Province, about 320km southeast of the capital, Bogota. Authorities found with him two pistols and a knife that he purportedly used to slash the throats of his victims.
“That knife is a silent witness to at least 3,000 killings, ordered or executed, by this Colombian criminal who has finally fallen,” Santos said, without providing more details of the killings figure he gave.
“The killer of killers has fallen,” Santos said in a news conference.
The operation began on Dec. 24 and involved the police and air force. Officials on Tuesday said they had found a body that resembled Guerrero, but it wasn’t until Wednesday that they confirmed it was him using fingerprints, he said. Two police officers also died in the operation.
Santos said that authorities had been after Guerrero for many years and his death “demonstrates the courage and determination” of Colombia’s armed forces and police.
However, the director of Colombia’s Legal Medicine Institute, Juan Angel Isaac, said the autopsy didn’t find gunfire or blade wounds on Guerrero’s body. Police director General Oscar Naranjo said Guerrero likely drowned after losing his footing while carrying a heavy load amid the fighting.
Santos said the US$2.5 million reward would be paid to several informants.
As a young man, Guerrero joined a paramilitary band on Colombia’s eastern plains led by Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a feared drug trafficker from the disbanded Medellin cartel who was killed by security forces in 1989, according to Colombian officials.
In April 2006, when the paramilitary group demobilized under a peace process led by former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, Guerrero returned and rearmed his men as a drug trafficking group.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS