Colombian drug lord with $5m US bounty killed in army raid

Notorious 39-year-old, Colombian cartel Victor Navaro, better known as 'Megateo' has been killed in a military raid in the Catatumbo region near the border with Venezuela.

With a $5m US bounty on his head, he had faced 45 different arrest warrants and was especially hunted for a 2006 ambush in which his men killed 17 soldiers and intelligence agents who had set out from Bogotá seeking to capture him.

President Juan Manuel Santos on Friday congratulated his armed forces for killing the cocaine warlord in the lawless Catatumbo region. 

"Megateo's brazenness drew comparisons, although in miniature, to Pablo Escobar, the cocaine kingpin who terrorized Colombia for two decades until he was killed by police in 1993."

The notorious drug lord, who claimed to lead a holdout faction of a leftist rebel band that disbanded in 1991, but he was believed to have been one of the country's biggest cocaine traffickers.

"Megateo was born into a peasant family, he took to crime in the late 1990s after paramilitaries killed his mother and a sister, according to Colombian investigators. Navarro projected a Robin Hood image, sharing some wealth with local people while putting numerous public officials on his payroll, US and Colombian officials say."

Source: Al Jazeera