Drug Lord Promised No Extradition : Trafficking: Barco says a cocaine kingpin will stand trial in Colombia if he gives up. Twelve police are killed in two days.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas today said the leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel will not be extradited to the United States if he turns himself in.

It was the first time Barco has made such a promise to a drug-trafficking suspect since he ordered a government crackdown in August.

Barco made the offer to the Medellin leader, Pablo Escobar, in an interview with the Colombian radio network RCN.

“Mr. Escobar has said that he is going to give himself up, and I say that if he surrenders I guarantee the judges will judge him with complete impartiality,” Barco said, referring to Colombian courts.

In the last seven months, the Barco government has extradited 15 drug-trafficking suspects to the United States.

Like all other trafficking suspects, Escobar faces no drug charges in Colombia. He does face several murder charges, including one for the slaying of a newspaper publisher, Guillermo Cano.

Cano was killed in a submachine-gun attack in front of his Bogota daily newspaper, El Espectador, on Dec. 17, 1987. The newspaper had been crusading for government action against drug traffickers.

In the interview today, Barco guaranteed Escobar a fair trial in Colombia.

No major drug trafficker has ever been tried, convicted, sentenced and imprisoned in Colombia on any charge.

In a related development, drug barons today claimed responsibility for kidnaping a Colombian senator and said they would execute him if two men detained by the police were killed.

In a statement sent to Colombia’s national news agency, the drug traffickers also said they would explode a bomb in a wealthy Bogota suburb because authorities had not met their demand to release two other detainees.

Sen. Federico Estrada Velez, 63, of the ruling Liberal Party, was taken from his car Tuesday in the city of Medellin.

Seventy-five judges have been killed in Colombia in the last 12 years. Many of them were handling drug trafficking cases. It also is common knowledge in Colombia that some federal judges can be bribed. Several judges are dismissed each year for corruption.

Cocaine bosses bent on halting extraditions have stepped up their terror campaign. On Monday and Tuesday, traffickers killed at least 12 police officers in and around Medellin, officials said.

Last week, traffickers threatened to set off a bomb in Bogota for each new extradition. The threat was issued after the government extradited to the United States a drug suspect following a two-week hiatus.

The chief of the national police, Gen. Miguel Gomez Padilla, told reporters late Tuesday that police reinforcements would be sent to Medellin.