TODAY COLOMBIA (EFE) Colombia’s National Police said it has arrested the top leader of the Office of Envigado drug gang, which was founded as the enforcement wing of late drug lord Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.
Julián Andrey González Vásquez, alias “Barny,” was detained in Bogota after he traveled there from Costa Rica, where he had been living.
The National Police said in a press release that he came back to Colombia to obstruct the judicial proceedings against him and reorganize the structures of his criminal gang in the slums of Medellin, the Andean nation’s second city.
After he traveled to Central America in 2011, the Colombian National Police and the Attorney General’s Office began taking steps to have him arrested and extradited; to that end, Interpol had issued a “blue notice” against him and was in the process of publishing its highest-level “red notice.”
Gonzalez is accused of killing two police narcotics officers in Medellin’s Botanical Gardens in July 2012, the release said, adding that he also is suspected in the deaths of three people in 2008 and of overseeing criminal gangs in various Medellin neighborhoods from Costa Rica.
Named after a city in Medellin’s metropolitan area, the Office of Envigado was founded in the 1980s by Escobar, who headed the now-defunct Medellin cartel until his death in a shootout with police in December 1993.
Initially functioning as a faction of the Medellin mob, it has evolved into a drug-trafficking outfit in its own right.
