A son of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera was extradited to the USA on Friday, 9 months after his arrest in Mexico, a senior U.S. regulation enforcement official stated.
Ovidio Guzman Lopez was in federal custody in Chicago and has been linked to violence and the drug commerce, the official stated. A joint operation between the DEA and the U.S. Marshals Service led to the extradition.
In an announcement Friday night time, U.S. Lawyer Basic Merrick Garland known as Guzman a frontrunner of the Sinaloa Cartel — the highly effective drug trafficking group previously led by Guzman’s father — and described the extradition as the latest step to “assault” each facet of the group.
“The battle towards the cartels has concerned unimaginable braveness by United States regulation enforcement and Mexican regulation enforcement and army servicemembers, lots of whom have given their lives within the pursuit of justice,” Garland stated.
Guzman was taken into custody Jan. 5 within the Sinaloa metropolis of Culiacán. Violence erupted in the city following his arrest, with alleged cartel members carjacking residents and setting automobiles on fireplace.
After a earlier arrest in 2019, Mexican authorities launched Guzman following a gunbattle generally known as the “Battle of Culiacán.”
A member of the “Chapitos” — as 4 of the sons are identified — Guzman was indicted in April on federal costs of large-scale drug trafficking, cash laundering and violent crimes linked to his father’s arrest and extradition in 2017, the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for California’s Southern District said at the time.
Prosecutors described the 4 brothers as cartel leaders, and all of them had been indicted in April. The opposite three weren’t in custody on the time, and their whereabouts weren’t instantly clear.
The prosecutor’s workplace accused the brothers of transporting and manufacturing tons of medication, together with cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. When their indictments had been introduced, Lawyer Basic Merrick Garland known as the group the “largest, most violent and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation on this planet.”
In addition they allegedly bribed officers and used homicide, kidnapping and different violent crimes towards regulation enforcement, rival drug traffickers and cartel members, prosecutors stated.
Their father, the previous head of the Sinaloa Cartel, was convicted in 2019 and is serving a life sentence at a most safety jail in Colorado.
His wife was released from prison Wednesday after serving lower than two years for serving to run his multi-billion greenback drug empire.
This text was initially printed on NBCNews.com