In the last few hours, the Police captured at El Dorado Airport alias Bam Bam, another of the hitmen who participated in the crime of businessman Gustavo Aponte Fonnegra, mistakenly killed on February 11 in northern Bogotá.
EL TIEMPO’s Investigative Unit exclusively established that the subject was carrying a false passport and was captured at midnight this Tuesday.
An informant?
The capture of ‘Bam Bam’ was carried out 24 hours after Leonel Enrique Llanos Paternina, alias Tony, was sent to prison after being captured in Villavicencio and accused of being the man on the motorcycle on which the hitman who mistakenly shot fled: Isaac David Rodríguez.
The trail of ‘Bam Bam’, who was trying to leave for Lima, Peru, was found in the chat group that the criminal gang set up to plan the crime of a gold businessman who was the target of the criminal plan: Olimpo Oliver Peñaranda.
As EL TIEMPO revealed, the group is called ‘the Gladiators’. And besides ‘Tony’, ‘Bam Bam’ and the hitman, other aliases already identified appeared: ‘Zorro’, ‘Carepapa’, ‘Pequeño’, ‘Junior’ and ‘JJ’.
Prosecutor 100 of the Life Unit, Elsa Cristina Reyes, not only recovered security cameras where the faces of several of the hitmen can be seen, but also documented that the criminal gang – with tentacles on the Atlantic Coast and apparently in Peru – tried to carry out two previous attacks on the gold businessman.
Oliver’s statement
24 hours ago, through the Crop agency, Olimpo Oliver spoke out about the case.
Oliver began by assuring that he is a businessman in the mining-energy sector with investments in gas, copper, and gold, with more than 12 years of experience.
“In 2018, a project was developed in southern Bolívar in which the formalization of many illegal or artisanal miners began through the mining titleholder. This process today benefits dozens of new mining companies and more than a thousand people who now do responsible and legal mining hand in hand with the OPG Group. This formalization benefits families but affects the criminals who profited from this business for years. And those are the criminals who seek to attack the businessman,” the statement reads.
In fact, they explain that the threats come from groups outside the law such as the FARC and the ELN.
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They also point out that in 2020 Oliver went to the authorities and urged them to take strong actions against this scourge, with successful results.
As EL TIEMPO had warned, other captures of the hitmen would be imminent, three of them killed by the intellectual authors of the double crime in which both the rice businessman Gustavo Aponte and his bodyguard Luis Gabriel Gutiérrez lost their lives.
INVESTIGATIVE UNIT
u.investigativa@eltiempo.com
@UinvestigativaET
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