One of Colombia's legendary drug lords and a key leader of the Medellin cartel has been deported to Colombia after serving 25 years of a 30-year sentence in the United States, the Associated Press reported, BTA reported.
Fabio Ochoa arrived in Bogota yesterday afternoon, wearing a modest gray sweatshirt and carrying his personal belongings in a plastic bag. After he got off the plane, he was greeted by immigration officers in bulletproof vests. There were no police on site.
Immigration officials took his fingerprints and confirmed through a database that Ochoa was not wanted by Colombian authorities. The country's immigration agency said on the social media site "Ex" that Ochoa had been "released so he could return to his family". "They set me up", Ochoa said when reporters at Bogota's El Dorado airport asked him if he regretted his actions.
The former cartel boss smiled, hugging his daughter, whom he hadn't seen in seven years, and said he would go to Medellin to live with his family. "The nightmare is over," said Ochoa, 67.
According to U.S. authorities, Ochoa and his older brothers made their fortunes when cocaine began flooding the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so much so that in 1987 are on the Forbes billionaires list.
While living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Pablo Escobar. Escobar died in a shootout with authorities in Medellin in 1993. Ochoa was first charged in the United States for his alleged role in the 1986 murder of Barry Seale, an American pilot who flew cocaine for the Medellin cartel but became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Along with his two older brothers, Juan David and Jorge Luis, Ochoa surrendered to Colombian authorities in the early 1990s under a deal that avoided extradition to the United States. The three brothers were released from prison in 1996, but three years later Ochoa was arrested again for drug trafficking and in 2001 was extradited to the United States under an indictment in Miami that named him and more than 40 others as part of a drug smuggling conspiracy.