Colombian Drug Baron Shot Dead in Madrid Hospital
Leónidas Vargas killed by two gunmen in front of horrified patients
The Colombian cocaine cartel boss Leónidas Vargas was shot dead in his bed in front of horrified fellow patients at Madrid's public Doce de Octubre hospital last night.
A masked man walked into the fifth floor room that 57-year-old Vargas shared with at least one other patient at 8pm (7pm GMT) and fired four shots from a silenced pistol, Spanish police said. A second armed man stood guard outside the door.
Vargas, known as the King of Caquetá, died instantly, with two of the bullets reportedly hitting him as he lay in bed.
The two assassins, thought to be professional Colombian sicarios, escaped from the hospital, one of Madrid's largest, before the alarm could be raised.
"My husband saw the killer," a woman who was in the room next door told journalists. "He said that it must be very cold outside because he had seen a man with a scarf and a hat in the corridor."
She said they had then heard muffled bangs coming from Vargas's room, but did not recognise them as gun shots.
Police said they would be studying CCTV footage from inside the hospital to identify the killers.
Vargas, also known as El Viejo or The Old Man, was on the list of Colombia's most-wanted cartel bosses when arrested in Spain two years ago.
Police accused him of trafficking 427kg (941lbs) of cocaine that had been discovered in a container in the port of Valencia, eastern Spain.
As a drug baron in the southern Caquetá region of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, Vargas worked closely with Pablo Escobar's infamous Medellín cartel.
He ran a network of clandestine laboratories which mass-produced cocaine for export to the United States.
Vargas is thought to have organized his own bands of sicarios in the Caquetá region and to have ordered a hit on the Colombian presidential candidate Horacio Serpa.
In 1995 he was jailed in Colombia for murder and drug-trafficking but was released eight years later. He survived an earlier attempt by rivals to assassinate him when a bomb exploded in his jail in 1997.
He was arrested at a Madrid hotel in 2006 as he prepared to travel to the football World Cup finals in Germany, carrying a false Venezuelan passport.
Although facing drug-trafficking charges, the cartel boss had been released on bail from prison because of a lung and heart condition.
It was that condition which was being treated at the Doce de Octubre hospital.
A masked man walked into the fifth floor room that 57-year-old Vargas shared with at least one other patient at 8pm (7pm GMT) and fired four shots from a silenced pistol, Spanish police said. A second armed man stood guard outside the door.
Vargas, known as the King of Caquetá, died instantly, with two of the bullets reportedly hitting him as he lay in bed.
The two assassins, thought to be professional Colombian sicarios, escaped from the hospital, one of Madrid's largest, before the alarm could be raised.
"My husband saw the killer," a woman who was in the room next door told journalists. "He said that it must be very cold outside because he had seen a man with a scarf and a hat in the corridor."
She said they had then heard muffled bangs coming from Vargas's room, but did not recognise them as gun shots.
Police said they would be studying CCTV footage from inside the hospital to identify the killers.
Vargas, also known as El Viejo or The Old Man, was on the list of Colombia's most-wanted cartel bosses when arrested in Spain two years ago.
Police accused him of trafficking 427kg (941lbs) of cocaine that had been discovered in a container in the port of Valencia, eastern Spain.
As a drug baron in the southern Caquetá region of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, Vargas worked closely with Pablo Escobar's infamous Medellín cartel.
He ran a network of clandestine laboratories which mass-produced cocaine for export to the United States.
Vargas is thought to have organized his own bands of sicarios in the Caquetá region and to have ordered a hit on the Colombian presidential candidate Horacio Serpa.
In 1995 he was jailed in Colombia for murder and drug-trafficking but was released eight years later. He survived an earlier attempt by rivals to assassinate him when a bomb exploded in his jail in 1997.
He was arrested at a Madrid hotel in 2006 as he prepared to travel to the football World Cup finals in Germany, carrying a false Venezuelan passport.
Although facing drug-trafficking charges, the cartel boss had been released on bail from prison because of a lung and heart condition.
It was that condition which was being treated at the Doce de Octubre hospital.
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