The traveler who was arrested immediately after a KLM flight on Friday is now a free man. The individual in question is Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder.
Lehder departed from Frankfurt, via Schiphol, to Bogotá. Flight KL741 arrived at Bogotá El Dorado Airport on Friday at 14:26 local time. Upon disembarking from the KLM 787, the Colombian police immediately arrested the former drug lord. The elderly Lehder was a key figure in the Medellín cartel and served 33 years in a U.S. prison. Since his release in 2020, the 77-year-old drug lord had been living in Germany.
He most likely didn’t anticipate that Colombian justice still had unfinished business with him. However, he remained on the radar of the authorities due to his involvement in drug offenses and arms trafficking. Lehder’s victims were surprised by a striking turn in his case. On Monday, the drug lord was released because his sentence had expired. Before leaving prison, he shouted “Viva Colombia!” and waved his release document. His victims disagree with the ruling and hope that the man will still face punishment.
Escobar
In the 1980s, drug lord Lehder, together with Pablo Escobar, led the cocaine trade routes to the U.S. and Western Europe. The leaders of the Medellín cartel created smuggling routes via Suriname and the Antilles, with Amsterdam serving as a central hub in the network. Through the Dutch capital, the cartel distributed cocaine throughout Europe.
By the late 1980s, the U.S. intensified its hunt for Escobar, leading the two to focus more on Western Europe, including the Netherlands. The Medellín cartel is considered the first criminal organization to flood the Dutch market with large quantities of cocaine. According to a Dutch police informant from the U.S. narcotics brigade, the drug lord even visited the country in the 1980s.