The world's most notorious drug lord used a secret tunnel and a motorcycle to escape from his high-security prison cell
For a second time, Joaquín "El Chapo," or "Shorty," Guzmán Loera, the world’s most dangerous drug trafficker, escaped from a high-security prison, Mexico's National Security Commission said on Sunday.
In a brief news conference on Sunday, Monte Alejandro Rubido, Mexico's national security commissioner, said that at approximately 8:52 Saturday evening, the Altiplano federal prison's surveillance cameras recorded Guzmán approaching a shower area.
Officials thought Guzmán was taking longer than usual in the shower and decided to check on him — his cell and the shower were both empty.
Guzmán slipped through a 1 1/2 foot by 1 1/2 foot gap in the shower floor and then climbed down a 32-foot ladder into a mile-long tunnel. The 5 1/2 feet high and 2 feet 7 inches wide tunnel was illuminated and equipped with a ventilation system.
A motorcycle built on to rails was also found in the secret mile-long passage, which led to an abandonded construction site.
Authorities detained 18 prison employees for questioning, ordered a massive manhunt for Guzmán, and shut down the airport in the nearby city of Toluca.
However, according to VICE News, Toluca's airport director of operations received no instructions from security officials following Guzmán's jailbreak.
"We never closed the airport and it's been operating as normal," director Miguel Perez told VICE News. "Our security is a little raised, but overall, all normal."
In 2001, Guzmán paid guards to help him slip out of the high-security Puente Grande prison near the city of Guadalajara following a previous arrest in 1993.
After a 13-year manhunt, on February 22, 2014, Mexican marines surrounded his house in Sinaloa and caught the drug lord trying to escape through a secret door beneath a bathtub that led into a tunnel network.
Embarrassment for Peña Nieto
The flight of Guzmán, whose exploits made him a legendary figure in villages scattered in the sierra where he grew up in northwestern Mexico, seriously undermines President Enrique Pena Nieto's pledge to bring order to a country racked by years of gang violence.
The breakout occurred in the State of Mexico, the home state of Pena Nieto, who took office in 2012 vowing to confront the cartels that have killed more than 100,000 people since 2007.
Before his election victory, politicians in Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party mocked their conservative rivals for letting Guzmán escape while they ran the country, saying it would not have happened on their watch.
When news of Guzmán's getaway broke, the Mexican president was en route to France, where he landed early Sunday morning. A senior law-enforcement figure said Guzmán's escape had disrupted plans for various security officials who were supposed to be accompanying Pena Nieto to France.
Wanted by Washington
Guzmán's escape could also strain relations with the US, which wanted him extradited, said Alberto Islas, a security expert at consultancy Risk Evaluation.
"They were concerned about how dangerous he was, and they had a lack of confidence in the Mexican authorities to stop him operating from jail," he added.
Guzmán became one of the world's top crime bosses, running the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, which smuggled billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines into the US and fought vicious turf wars with other Mexican gangs.
Before his recapture in 2014, the US Department of State had offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest.
(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter and Dave Graham; Additional reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez; Editing by Dave Graham and Andrew Heavens)
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