BOGOTA.- The director of the La Modelo prisonone of the main penitentiary centers in Colombiawas shot dead in Bogotaafter receiving several death threats, the government reported.
“Retired Colonel Elmer Fernández has just been murdered (…) when he was in his car,” the Minister of Justice, Néstor Osuna.
The director was traveling in a car from the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute of Colombia (Inpec) in the Colombian capital when he was shot.
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 the social network Gustavo Petro.
The president announced a “lockdown plan” by the police to find the attackers and an “extraordinary security council to establish measures for all the country’s prisons.”
According to local media, Fernández had received threats in pamphlets from prisoners a few weeks ago. They warned him not to order guard operations again in some yards of La Modelo.
In that prison, one of the main ones in the country along with La Picota in Bogotá and the Cómbita prison (center), there are around 3,000 people serving their sentences.
Osuna announced radical changes in the National Protection Unit (UNP) after the murder of the director of the La Modelo prison.
He indicated that now “the process” for the delivery of security schemes to 506 Inpec officials who have reported threats will be immediate. “For some positions, protection will be immediate (…) and when there is a threat it will be an emergency procedure,” she said, reported Semana.com.
He also pointed out that a reinforced protection scheme will be provided for Inpec officials who are at greater risk either due to their position or the decisions they have made.
The country, the world’s main cocaine producer, is far from the violence of its neighbor Ecuador, where prisons are the epicenter of massacres and shootings.
Also in Ecuadorian prisons, the destination of much of the drugs produced on the Colombian side of the border, inmates have held guards for days.
Source: With information from AFP / Semana.com
