Colombia’s president hails capture of cartel boss Dairo Antonio Úsuga | Colombia

Colombia’s president, Iván Duque, has celebrated the downfall of “the most feared drug trafficker on Earth” after one of South America’s most wanted men was captured at his rainforest hideout following a massive manhunt involving hundreds of troops as well as US and British intelligence agencies.

Dairo Antonio Úsuga, the 50-year-old head of the Clan del Golfo drug cartel, was arrested on Saturday afternoon after heavily armed operatives laid siege to the criminal’s jungle stomping ground in north-west Colombia.

“Identify yourself!” a special forces army sergeant reportedly bellowed at the shirtless fugitive, who is known as Otoniel, after spotting him trying to hide beneath a heap of branches and scrubs.

“Cool it, soldier,” replied Úsuga, before confirming his name, raising his hands and asking not to be killed.

By nightfall, the former leftwing guerrilla and paramilitary had been flown to Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, handcuffed and stony-faced, where he was paraded before the media wearing black wellington boots.

In a triumphant televised broadcast, Duque compared the arrest to the 1993 slaying of Pablo Escobar in Medellín, saying: “This is the most severe blow that has been dealt to drug trafficking in this country this century.”

Colombian authorities had been pursuing Úsuga for about a decade, with the US state department offering a $5m reward for information leading to the capture of a criminal it accused of controlling a vast network of cocaine laboratories and illegal runways and speedboat jetties used to smuggle drugs north. A total of 132 warrants had been issued for Úsuga’s arrest.

The cartel boss’s fate was reportedly sealed early this year when authorities decided to intensify their hunt, amid soaring levels of cocaine production.

Two weeks ago, intelligence officers managed to identify the approximate location of Úsuga’s hideout in the highly strategic Urabá region near the border with Panama, according to an account published by the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo on Sunday. They did so partly thanks to cartel employees who were ferrying medicine to the drug lord to treat kidney problems.

At about 5am on Friday, the decision was taken to launch Operación Osiris, a multi-pronged military assault on Úsuga’s rural domain, which security chiefs named after the ancient Egyptian god of the underworld.

Colombian media reports said the operation involved more than 20 helicopters, 10 unmanned surveillance drones and hundreds of troops who blocked rivers and roads to stop the target – codenamed “El Blanco” – fleeing a 3.5 sq km search area in Antioquia province. As commandos swarmed toward their objective past eight rings of security, navy vessels lurked offshore in the Caribbean Sea to ensure Úsuga could not escape by boat.

By Saturday afternoon, the news magazine Semana said four members of an elite army unit had tracked the “bloodthirsty capo” to near a simple wooden farmhouse in the Paramillo Massif mountain range. It was there that,…