Colombian police Friday captured Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the head of the Cali cocaine cartel and one of the world's most wanted drug traffickers.
Police said Rodriguez begged officers not to shoot when they found him hidden in a wooden closet. "Calm down boys, don't kill me, I am a man of peace, I will surrender," sources close to the operation quoted him as saying.Rodriguez's capture, which ended a long hunt by more than 6,000 crack police and army officers, came in the early afternoon in Cali, 180 miles southwest of Bogota, a presidential spokeswoman said.
Television pictures showed a fat, bearded Rodriguez wearing a white shirt with blue stripes being led in handcuffs from a police helicopter under heavy guard following his arrival in Bogota. It was not immediately clear where he would be held.
"This is the beginning of the end of the Cali cartel," a triumphant President Ernesto Samper told a news conference shortly after the arrest. "We will not rest until we see this problem totally eradicated."
Samper, whose commitment to the war on drugs was severely questioned by Washington when he took power last August, said the capture was a victory for his anti-drug policies. "We are going to show we are a nation of good people, a sterile ground for crime and fertile for justice," he said.
The United States, which has long sought Rodriguez's capture, immediately congratulated Colombia. "This is a great triumph for the Colombian police and the government of Colombia," U.S. ambassador Myles Frechette said in a statement.
The capture was the most important Colombian success in the war on drugs since police shot dead Medellin drug cartel boss Pablo Escobar in December 1993.
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, alias "The Chess Player," is wanted in several countries including the United States. Along with his fugitive brother Miguel, he heads the Cali cocaine cartel, which controls more than 70 percent of world trade in the drug.
The Cali cartel took over from Escobar's Medellin gang as the main players in the cocaine trade during the late 1980s but have avoided the Medellin cartel's terror tactics, preferring to operate in a more low-key way.
Radio reports said other people appeared to have been arrested in the operation, which was directed personally by National Police Chief General Rosso Jose Serrano, but there was no immediate confirmation of this.
Samper sent a special squad of around 6,000 crack army and police officers to Cali to catch the cartel ringleaders.