‘El Chapo’ tortured and killed 3 men with his own hands, eyewitness testifies
- Former bodyguard to the ex-drug lord recounts how his boss beat and executed rival cartel workers
- Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman has pleaded not guilty to more than a dozen charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy, money laundering and illegal firearms
First he beat them with a stick until their bones shattered.
Then he flung their bodies at the foot of a raging bonfire, uttered one final obscenity, shot them in their heads and burned their remains.
Former cartel bodyguard Isaias “Memin” Valdez Rios described the killings after taking the stand as the government’s final cooperating witness at Guzman’s drug trafficking trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, which ended its 10th week Thursday.
Valdez Rios, arrested on drug charges in 2014, said he personally witnessed Guzman pull the trigger during the side-by-side slayings and saw the ruthless narco assassinate a third badly tortured man around the same time between 2006 and 2007 in the Sinaloa mountains.
He said the bonfire brutality involved two men who allegedly worked for the rival Los Zetas cartel and were delivered to Guzman after their capture by cartel capo Damaso Lopez Nunez, the government’s prior witness in the case.