MEXICO-GUZMAN/PRISON-MORNING Search and investigation continues into Guzman escape

Record ID: 147204

  • Title: MEXICO-GUZMAN/PRISON-MORNING Search and investigation continues into Guzman escape
  • Date: 14th July 2015
  • Summary: ALMOLOYA DE JUAREZ, MEXICO (JULY 14, 2015) (REUTERS) PRISON EXTERIOR IN EARLY MORNING HOURS VARIOUS OF MILITARY TROOPS OUTSIDE PRISON AT DAWN GUARD INSIDE PRISON SIGN THAT READS "CHECKPOINT" AT PRISON ENTRANCE PRISON EXTERIOR IN EARLY MORNING HOURS (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) RESIDENT, JOSE HERNANDEZ, SAYING: "Escaping with such ease, he had possibly been planning his escape a w
  • Embargoed: 29th July 2015 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Mexico
  • Country: Mexico
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA9RSI8D1NOCJPU8TFISHSEWE5W
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Military troops and police heavily patrolled the maximum security prison on Tuesday (July 14) where the country's top drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped from at the weekend.
    Guzman sparked a massive manhunt after escaping from Altiplano prison on Saturday (July 11) night in a mile-long underground tunnel that led from his cell into a deserted building, dealing a bitter blow for President Enrique Pena Nieto.
    Mexican officials have admitted Guzman "had to have" had help to escape from prison officials. Resident, Jose Hernandez, agrees.
    "Escaping with such ease, he had possibly been planning his escape a while back, because this can't be done so quickly. I think it had to be an inside job because it can't be so easy to escape," Hernandez said.
    Authorities have offered 60 million pesos ($3.82 million) for information leading to Guzman's capture after his daring getaway, his second from a high security lockup in less than 15 years.
    So far, 31 prison officials, including the facility's head, have been taken in for questioning over Guzman's escape.
    But the attorney general's office had not interviewed people living in the immediate surroundings of the prison as of midday Monday, a spokesman for the office said.
    Attention is also being focused on a nearby waterway expansion project begun about a year ago. An open ditch with three reinforced tubes 2.5 meters wide snaked around the prison, offering "the perfect screen so people wouldn't notice the work on the escape tunnel," said a soldier who declined to be named.
    Two soldiers and one policeman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the alarm was not raised over Guzman's disappearance until after 10 p.m., more than an hour after the government said he was last seen at 8:52 p.m.
    El Chapo was one of the world's most notorious crime bosses, running the powerful Sinaloa Cartel for years.
    In 2001, Guzman bribed guards to help him escape from a prison near the city of Guadalajara after a previous arrest in 1993. He was recaptured in northwestern Mexico in February 2014.
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