Government gives new details of drug lord’s getaway from prison as bounty set at 60m pesos and minister insists ‘everybody involved in this escape will fall’

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The Mexican government has offered a reward of 60m pesos ($3.8m) for information leading to the capture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, as it revealed new details of the drug lord’s daring tunnel escape from a high-security jail.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest CCTV footage, released by Mexico’s security services, shows the moments shortly before Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman escaped prison.

“We are talking about an enemy of society who has done great damage to Mexico,” the interior minister, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, told reporters on Monday. “There will be no let up in the efforts to recapture him.”

Osorio Chong said the search for Chapo began immediately the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel disappeared from view in the shower area of his cell at 8.52pm on Saturday.

He said police followed the kingpin down the hole below the shower, and into a mile-long tunnel that reached a depth of up to 60 feet.

“It was designed with sophisticated technology that allowed him to get out in a lot less time than it took the security forces to follow him,” the minister said. The ventilated passage included a motorcycle adapted to run along a rail, and emerges in a recently constructed house built on a small hill with a panoramic view of the prison and a nearby military base.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest El Chapo’s rail-running escape motorcycle sits in the tunnel under the half-built house where authorities say he made it to freedom. Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

“The tunnel had electricity, and as he passed through it he broke the light bulbs, making the search operation more complicated,” Osorio Chong said.

The minister insisted that the jail, where Chapo had been incarcerated since his arrest in February 2014, fulfilled international security criteria.

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The capo, he added, also wore a localisation bracelet and was under round-the-clock surveillance, with cameras inside his cell that had just two blind spots because of human rights requirements. One of the blind spots was in the shower. The prisoner cut off his bracelet before he entered the tunnel, Osorio Chong said.

“This is an extraordinary event that, of course, breaks the security protocols of any prison in the world,” the minister said.

A surveillance video of Guzman’s last moments in prison has been released, showing him walking to the bed, where he sits and appears to change his shoes.

He then walks to the shower and toilet area, behind a low dividing wall of about waist height, and simply disappears. Another video filmed after the escape shows the gaping square hole cut into what appears to be the floor of the shower.

The Sinaloa cartel leader’s successful dash for freedom has once again focused attention on corruption and collusion which are presumed to have enabled the escape. Analysts have questioned how the tunnel was excavated without raising any alarm, and how its builders reached the exact location of his shower without access to the prison plans.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yellow police tape surrounds the construction site where El Chapo’s escape tunnel came to the surface. Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

The government has promised a full investigation. “Every federal, state or municipal official that participated in these events will be punished. Everybody involved in the escape will fall,” Osorio Chong said.



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During Monday night’s press conference, however, the minister insisted that the government had not been informed of at least two previous escape plans contained in Drug Enforcement Administration documents obtained by the Associated Press.

“We have no, absolutely no, information about that,” he said, adding that “an element” within the DEA had told the Mexican government that they didn’t know where the information came from.

Osorio Chong said that it was working closely with the US and the international community in general to boost its own extensive manhunt currently under way across Mexico, with special attention to the country’s borders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A photographer exits a tunnel connected to the Altiplano federal penitentiary and used by drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman to escape. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters

With the crisis over Chapo’s deeply embarrassing escape already threatening to sour relations with with the US government, the Chicago Crime Commission announced it is restoring the capo’s status as the city’s public enemy No 1.

The non-official body first gave the capo the title in 2013, based on its role as an important US distribution centre for his cartel’s drugs, but removed it after his capture the following year.