Sources at Colombia’s Prosecutor General’s Office told Spanish newspaper El Pais that the Colombian survivor of a US drone strike on an alleged narco-submarine was released due to a lack of evidence.
The victim, Jonathan Obando, had already been released from the Kennedy Hospital in Bogota on October 28 where he was admitted because of the serious injuries allegedly sustained in the October 16 attack.
When announcing the attack on October 18, US President Donald Trump said that the “narco-terrorists” who survived the attack would be taken to their native countries, Colombia and Ecuador, “for detention and prosecution.”
In a response, Interior Minister Armando Benedetti said that Obando would be “processed by justice, because presumably he is a delinquent who was trafficking drugs.”
The prosecution opened a preliminary investigation into Obando’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking, but was forced to drop this because “until now, they didn’t find any evidence or testimony that could indicate that this person committed a crime on national territory,” a prosecution source told El Pais.
If the former suspect was involved in criminal activity, as claimed by the US Government, the prosecutors received no evidence of this.
He has no criminal record, nor is his name linked to any criminal network. It is most likely that he was hired to transport the cargo to a specific location, but that he was not the mastermind behind the drug trafficking operation. This is what is known as the outsourcing of criminal activity.
Prosecution source
Obando’s release from detention and hospital comes weeks after the Ecuadorean prosecution released the second surviving victim of the attempted extrajudicial killing without charges because there was “no report of a crime that has been brought to the attention of this institution.”
The US military has killed at least 67 people in Caribbean and Pacific waters since early September, but has yet to provide any evidence to support US Government claims that these victims were involved in drug trafficking.
Related posts:
