One of the former leaders of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Carlos Leder, who spent 33 years in prison in the US, was arrested upon his return to Colombia, the country's migration service announced.
„The migration service handed over Carlos Enrique Leder Rivas, the former leader of the Medellin cartel, to the Colombian police. There is a valid arrest warrant in our system for Leder Rivas, who arrived in the country from Frankfurt“, the agency's page on the social network X says.
As the newspaper El Tiempo recalls, Leder is currently facing a sentence in his homeland for arms trafficking. According to the publication, the former associate and accomplice of drug lord Pablo Escobar should serve 24 years in prison. Leder's lawyer, Sondra McCollins, claims that before her client's flight to Colombia, the country's prosecutor's office answered her question that he was not a defendant in any criminal case.
Leder is one of the founders of the Medellin cartel. In 1987, he was extradited to the United States, where he was sentenced to 135 years in prison for drug trafficking. Later, the sentence was reduced to 55 years in exchange for a deal with the American authorities. In 2020, Leder was released and deported to Germany, which provided him with documents, since his father is German. A US court approved the request of the former drug lord, now 75 years old, because he had health problems and had already served two-thirds of his sentence.