Pablo Escobar’s notorious hitman ‘Popeye’ has been charged with plotting the assassination of a top newspaper editor.
Jhon Jairo Velasquez Vasquez, aka ‘Popeye’, worked as the head of the gang of hitmen used by infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel.
Prosecutors have now revealed Vasquez has been charged with helping to plot the assassination of the Director of the newspaper El Espectador, Guillermo Cano Isaza, in 1986.
Isaza was one of the leading figures in the fight against drug trafficking and its penetration into Colombian politics and economics. He was shot to death on 17th December 1986 as he left the newspaper’s offices in his car.
Vasquez has now been charged with being “an accomplice” in Isaza’s murder after “new testimonies of members and cooperators of the former cartel of Medellin and other evidence was collected,” according to official sources.
Prosecutors also ordered the arrest of Gustavo Adolfo Gutierrez Arrubla, alias Maxwell, another of Escobar’s trusted hitmen.
Vasquez is accused of participating in a meeting where the heads of the Medellin cartel, among them Escobar, conspired to attack Isaza for his publications against the gang and agreed how he would be killed and who would carry it out.
Maxwell is said to have carried out “the intelligence tasks in Bogota and identified the movements and the daily routine” of the journalist.
Vasquez is currently being held in Valledupar maximum-security prison as he awaits trial for blackmail charges brought against him on 25th May 2018.
Prosecutors agreed Maxwell could remain in liberty until the trial for Isaza’s murder as long as he has regular meetings with the authorities, He is also banned from leaving the country and contacting the victim’s family.
Isaza’s widow Ana Maria Busquets de Cano said: “We have been waiting for 32 years, since 1986, for justice and to know what happened. I hope this decision will be used to find everything out. We hope the prosecution get all the information about both men regarding the crime.”
Popeye was in prison for more 23 years for the murder of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, who was killed on 18th August 1989. He handed himself into the authorities in 1991 and confessed to having killed 300 people.
He was released from prison in 2014 and claimed to have reintegrated back into society but he was then arrested for blackmail in May 2018.
The Medellin Cartel are believed to have been behind an attack against the El Espectador offices on 2nd September 1989 when a lorry full of explosives was set off outside, leaving dozens injured.
In a ruling in 1995, four individuals, Maria Ofelia Saldarriaga, Pablo Enrique Zamora, Carlos Martinez Hernandez, and Luis Carlos Molina Yepes, were found guilty of conspiring to commit Isaza’s murder and sentenced to prison terms of 16 years and eight months. However, the convictions of all but Molina were overturned on appeal.
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Story By: Ana Lacasa, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Central European News
