Won’t Be Blackmailed by Drug Barons, Colombian Chief Vows

Atty. Gen. Carlos Mauro Hoyos was killed hours after his abduction by a fusillade that shattered his skull, an autopsy showed today. Drug traffickers claimed responsibility.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas, in a nationwide television and radio address Monday night, said the government will not “cave in to vile blackmail and infamous threats” from Colombia’s cocaine barons.

A group calling itself “The Extraditables” said they killed Hoyos on Monday because he persisted in trying to extradite Colombians to the United States to face drug charges. (Story, Page 5.)

During the abduction, Hoyos was shot in his right foot and a lung. “They were serious wounds, but not necessarily fatal,” Education Minister Antonio Yepes Parra, a physician, who assisted in the autopsy in Medellin, told reporters.

“The prosecutor did not die as a result of the wounds he received during the abduction, but several hours later, finished off by gunfire,” Yepes said.

Yepes said Hoyos was killed at about 4 p.m. The attorney general’s handcuffed and blindfolded body was discovered about an hour later in a pine forest 13 miles southeast of Medellin. Bullets had shattered his skull. Twelve bullets were found in his body.