Colombian former model and beauty queen Angie Sanclemente, who has been on the run from the law since March, was arrested in Buenos Aires on Wednesday on charges of masterminding a drug trafficking ring, reports local media.
The fugitive model was apprehended in a K-Lodges Hostel in the Argentine capital’s Palermo district after a two-month international manhunt, according to a police spokesman.
Interpol issued an arrest warrant for Sanclemente in March, on suspicion that she was running an international drug trafficking operation using what she called “beautiful, unsuspicious” models and beauty queens to transport cocaine from Argentina to Western Europe.
The brunette model is now blond, according to CNN, and was posing as a Mexican by the name of “Annie.”
Sanclemente announced via her lawyer in March that she was not submitting to the authorities because “a woman like her, of statuesque beauty, is afraid of being violated, attacked in prison, physically or sexually.”
The lawyer’s request to exempt the former beauty queen from jail was denied by an Argentine court, and Sanclemente is now being held in custody.
The capture of the 30-year old Colombian in Palermo validates reports in early April that she was spotted – and with dyed blond hair – in that district of the Argentine capital.
In a recent interview with El Tiempo Sanclemente protested her innocence, and blamed the charges against her on relatives of her boyfriend, Argentine model Nicolas Matias Gualdo, who she accuses of being drug traffickers.
Sanclemente is thought to have been in hiding with her mother, who left her Barranquilla apartment when her daughter’s alleged criminal activities hit the headlines.
Sanclemente is said to have been seeing a Mexican drug lord known as “The Monster” but to have left him at the end of last year to form her own cocaine-smuggling gang.
Since then she had been heading a complex operation, where the women, who were told to look “nice, but not flashy,” would catch flights to various locations once every 24 hours carrying a load of the illegal drug.
Sanclemente’s drug syndicate was exposed when one of her 21-year-old “angels” was found carrying 55kg of cocaine in her suitcase at Buenos Aires airport.