3,500 died as Pablo’s henchmen ran amok

MEDELLIN was one of the deadliest places on Earth as Pablo Escobar ruled with a pitiless thirst for money, power and blood.

More than 3,500 are said to have been killed in assassinations and other atrocities at the height of his cartel’s reign of terror.

A reported 500 were police in Medellin itself. Senior officers, judges, government officials and politicians perished if they opposed Escobar.

He was responsible for bringing wholesale death elsewhere in Colombia with car explosions and even the bombing of a commercial airliner.

Escobar, who was finally shot dead by police in 1993 aged 44, had figures of power in his pocket as he massacred his way to riches.

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His worst atrocity was downing Avianca Flight 103 in November 1989. A bomb on the Boeing 727 exploded after it took off from Bogota for Cali, killing all 110 on board.

Escobar’s target was presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, but he was not on board.

The Medellin Cartel also detonated a car bomb in the capital Bogota in 1993, killing 25. The same year, Escobar’s men put a bomb in a Bogota mall, killing eight.

Ironically, the murder rate went up after Escobar died as druglords battled for supremacy.

More than 7,000 people were killed in the Medellin drug wars between 2009 and 2013.

The Medellin Cartel no longer exists but the city has remained the epicentre of the cocaine trade in Colombia.

And business is booming – with figures for 2017 revealing a record cocaine crop.