It was not the police that killed Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s most
powerful and infamous drug lord ever, but paramilitary leader
Carlos Castaño shot the fugitive personally, a demobilized paramilitary claims.
José Antonio Hernández, alias John, told prosecutors in Bucaramanga the order to kill Escobar came from Miguel Rodríguez, then leader of the infamous Cali cartel and was carried out by Castaño personally.
The demobilized confirmed earlier allegations that Castaño’s paramilitary group Los Pepes received assistance from the CIA and DEA and added they used Israeli equipment that made them able to locate the Medellín cartel capo.
“It wasn’t the police that killed him on the roof of that house. When the Pepes had located him it was Mr. Carlos Castaño who directly killed him,” Hernández said about the murder of a Medellín rooftop on December 2, 1993.
The official version has always been that Colombian authorities killed the drug lord after a long war between the Medellín cartel and the Colombian government.
Carlos Castaño would form paramilitary umbrella organization AUC shortly after teh death of Escobar. Fellow Pepes Vicente Castaño and Don Berna became commanders in his organization. Castaño himself was murdered in 2004, allegedly on the order of other AUC captains.