European drug lord and one of the most wanted criminals shot dead in Mexico. Why did he die?
According to investigators, the Dutchman had been cooperating with the Mexican Sinaloa cartel for years. According to American prosecutors, the organization is the largest supplier of drugs to the United States, and is also involved in money laundering and human trafficking. The criminal organization, one of the most brutal in the world, is responsible for thousands of murders. After the arrest of Sinaloa boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman (57) in 2017, a power struggle broke out in the cartel. Ebben was supposed to side with Guzman's rival, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada (77).
Since then, the 32-year-old has had to reckon with an attack from the enemy at any moment. However, it is likely that his alleged friends are behind the murder of the "king of cocaine". They learned that the Mexican Navy's anti-narcotics unit has located Ebben and intends to arrest him.
The gangsters feared that Ebben, if captured by the authorities, would reveal the truth about the cartel's global drug and arms trade. The assassins attacked him outside a luxury gym in the city of Atizapán de Zaragoza, near Mexico City, killing him just before he could get into his armored Cadillac . When the gunfire stopped, he lay dead on the ground between two luxury cars in the parking lot. According to a statement by a navy officer to Mexican newspaper Milenio, the assassins arrived just 14 minutes before the military police.
Marco Ebben - posed as an EU diplomat, Europol agent and DEA. Smuggled cocaine with pineapples, faked his own deathThe man was born on March 31, 1992 in the Netherlands. To hide his illegal activities, he resorted to various methods of smuggling: he allegedly hid drugs in T-shirts and detergent packages.
On Ebben's body, police found a fake U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) identification card and a voter card issued by the National Election Institute. Both documents listed Ebben's alias: Jesús Antonio Velásquez Rivas.
These were not the only false identities used by the criminal: in Russia he traveled as a supposed EU diplomat, and in Brazil as a special agent of Europol – an agency on whose most wanted list he was for smuggling 400 kilograms of cocaine in pineapple crates. His group specialised in trafficking illegal substances between Brazil and the Netherlands.
In October 2020, the drug lord was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. However, he has been successfully hiding from the police since then. To avoid arrest, he even faked his death. However, no evidence was found at the time, apart from a statement from his girlfriend, who claimed to have recognized the body.
According to the latest statistics from 2021, Mexico recorded an average of 94 murders per day. More than 97,000 people are missing. The vast majority of crimes are never solved. Gangs notoriously leave their dead victims in public places. This was the case with Marc Ebben.
The article is based on a translation of the text from Bild.de. The author is Kolja Gärtner
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