Pablo Escobar’s hit man, ‘Popeye,’ dies of cancer
08 February, 2020
A former hit man for late drug lord Pablo Escobar who confessed to killing hundreds of people during one of Colombia’s most violent periods died Thursday from cancer, prison authorities said.
Jhon Jairo Velasquez, known by his nickname Popeye, died at the National Cancer Institute in Bogota, where he had been hospitalized since late December, according to the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute.
Velasquez admitted to carrying out at least 300 murders himself and said he helped coordinate the deaths of some 3,000 other individuals on behalf of Escobar’s Medellin cartel during the 1980s and ’90s. He spent 23 years behind bars for plotting the murder of a presidential candidate and was released in 2014 on parole.
“Today it seems like a barbarity,” he told newsweekly Semana after leaving jail. “But when you’re in the middle of a war, those things seem justified.”
He went on to gain notoriety as an author and YouTube celebrity who delivered angry diatribes against leftist rebels and corrupt politicians and at one point expressed a desire to run for a seat in the senate.
Source: the-japan-news.com
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