Elmer Fernandez, the director of the La Modelo prisonone of the main penitentiary centers in Colombia, was shot dead this Thursday in Bogota. Days ago I had received several threats of death.
The Minister of Justice, Nestor Osuna, He announced the news of the crime through a video. “I am sorry to be the bearer of terrible news. The retired colonel has just been murdered Elmer Fernandez (…) when he was in his car,” he said.
The director was traveling in a car gray color, Mazda brand, of the prison authority INPEC in the Colombian capital when he was shot from a motorcycle. As it became known later, the vehicle did not have armored windows, making it an easy target for the hitmen.
Colonel Fernández “had taken office on April 4, he was carrying out orders to impart discipline and carrying out random searches. Today he is vilely murdered“, the president lamented on social network X, Gustavo Petro.
The president announced the launch of a Police “lock plan” to find attackers. In addition, he ordered the creation of an “extraordinary security council to establish measures for all the country’s prisons.”
The director of La Modelo, one of the main prisons in Colombia, is shot to death
According to local media, Fernández had received threats in pamphlets a few weeks ago by prisoners. They warned him not to order guard operations again in some yards of La Modelo.
Recently, the prison director had ordered the transfer of a dangerous criminal. Days later, he received an intimidating message attributed to the prisoner: “So that he can see that I do have power and if they transfer me I will kill his family. 05/09/2024″. “On behalf of Pedro Pluma to the director: if he searches me again for the patio, my family will kill him,” warned another of the messages.
in that prisonone of the main ones in the country along with La Picota de Bogotá and the Cómbita prison (center), there is around 3,000 people paying their sentences.
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The country, the world’s main cocaine producer, is far from violence from its neighbor Ecuador, where prisons are the epicenter of massacres and shootings.
Also in the Ecuadorian prisons, destination of much of the drugs produced on the Colombian side of the border, inmates have held guards for days.
Source: Ambito
