Colombian Army Captures Reputed Drug Cartel Pilot

The army announced Friday that it had arrested the pilot of drug cartel chieftain Pablo Escobar, saying that the aviator flew drug smuggling routes into the United States and that he was linked to the slaying last month of an important police official.

The army identified the flyer as Nicolas Gonzalez Cardona and said that he was captured in the cocaine capital of Medellin with eight other people, all of them wanted for questioning in the Aug. 18 murder of Col. Valdemar Franklin Quintero, chief of the national police detachment in the Medellin area.

Franklin’s killing and that, later the same day near Bogota, of leading presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan precipitated the government’s current crackdown on the drug lords.

Other Friday developments included:

-- The firebombing of nine state-owned vehicles in Medellin and the bombing of a bank branch in a Medellin suburb.

-- The announcement in Miami that Mauricio Ochoa, a Colombian with suspected family links to several of the 12 “most-wanted” cocaine cartel leaders, is being held there on drug smuggling charges.

-- A public opinion poll indicated more than 75% of Colombians support the government’s three-week-old war on drug traffickers but that more than 80% oppose any presence in this country of foreign soldiers to help in the fight.

The Colombian army’s 4th Brigade said in a news release that pilot Gonzalez made “international flights on one of the principal routes that the Medellin cartel has for distribution of cocaine between Colombia and the cities of New York and Miami, among others.” It also said that Gonzalez had frequent contact with Escobar and other important cartel leaders.

Friday’s bank bombing and the firebombings of government vehicles are the latest in a two-week wave of about 35 bomb blasts since “the Extraditables,” as the drug kingpins have taken to calling themselves, declared “total war” on the government Aug. 24.

Police blame the bombings on drug traffickers seeking to intimidate the government and force it to back down from its unprecedented anti-narcotics crackdown.

In Miami, a senior law-enforcement official said that Ochoa, 32, who was arrested there June 20, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed Thursday of helping mastermind an operation that shipped more than 7,700 pounds of cocaine into south Florida from August, 1985, to July, 1986.

The 19-count indictment names 11 other defendants, including Fabio Enrique Ochoa, 29, believed to be hiding at present in Colombia and alleged to be an even more important cartel figure than Mauricio Ochoa.

The media and law enforcement officials in Miami speculated that the Ochoas named in the latest indictment are related to the three Ochoa Vasquez brothers, one of whom is also named Fabio, whose names are among those at the top of the list of Medellin cartel bosses wanted for trial in the United States.