Bogota, Jan 11 (IANS/EFE) Colombian police have arrested the leader of the "Office of Envigado" gang of drug traffickers, according to media reports Saturday.
Julian Andrey Gonzalez Vasquez, alias "Barny", was detained in Bogota after he travelled there from Costa Rica, where he had been living.
Vasquez headed the gang, which was founded as the enforcement wing of the former drug lord Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel, reports said.
The Colombian National Police said in a press release that Vasquez came back to Colombia to obstruct the judicial proceedings against him and reorganise the his criminal gang in the slums of Medellin, the Andean nation's second largest city.
After he travelled to Central America in 2011, the Colombian National Police and the attorney general's office began taking steps to have him arrested and extradited.
To that end, Interpol issued a "blue notice" against him and was in the process of publishing its highest level "red notice"
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Vasquez was accused of killing two police officers in Medellin in July 2012, the police press release said, adding that he was also suspected to be involved in the death of three people in 2008 and of overseeing criminal gangs in various Medellin neighbourhoods from Costa Rica.
The "Office of Envigado" gang was founded in the 1980s by Escobar, who headed the now-defunct Medellin cartel until his death in a shootout with the police in December 1993.
Initially functioning as a faction of the Medellin gang, "Office of Envigado" has evolved into a drug-trafficking outfit in its own right.
--IANS/EFE
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