In an indication that fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar may be about to surrender, his wife and two children left Colombia on Saturday, a prosecutor said.
Radio reports said the Escobar family was headed for Germany. But a spokesman for the German Interior Ministry in Bonn said they would not be allowed to enter the country.German police have been ordered to turn the Escobars back, spokesman Karl-Heinz Schneider said Saturday.
Escobar - the leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel and one of the world's most hunted men - has reportedly requested that his family be placed in another country as a condition for his surrender.
In Medellin, at least 100 security agents in a convoy of 20 vehicles and two helicopters escorted Escobar's wife, Victoria, and his two children, Juan Pablo and Manuela, from their apartment to the airport on the city's outskirts.
Fernando Mantilla, a regional prosecutor in Medellin, said on local radio the family was bound for a foreign country, but he did not say which one.
They stopped over in Bogota for six hours where they stayed in a VIP lounge in the airport as an armored personnel carrier guarded the front of the international departure section and more than a hundred police toting automatic weapons watched entrances to the building.
The Escobars boarded a Lufthansa flight bound for Frankfurt, Germany, with a stopover in Caracas, Venezuela, said a police official at the airport who refused to give his name.
With the family was 16-year-old Juan Pablo's girlfriend, the police officer said.