NEW YORK: Accused Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is an “excellent father, friend, brother, son and partner,” his young wife said as his landmark trial in New York wound up.
“Everything that has been said in court about Joaquin, the good and the bad, has done nothing to change how I think about him after years of knowing him,” Emma Coronel, 29, said in a message on her Instagram account late Thursday.
In his almost three-month-long trial, Guzman, the 69-year-old former head of the Sinaloa drugs cartel known widely as El Chapo, or Shorty, was accused of smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs into the United States over the past quarter-century.
On Monday, the jury starts deliberating on its verdict. If convicted, Guzman is likely to spend the rest of his life in a US jail, having twice escaped from Mexican prisons before being extradited to the United States two years ago.
During the trial, which closed Thursday, Guzman’s former henchmen and colleagues said he had ordered the deaths of dozens of rivals, underlings suspected of being snitches and police officers who refused to take his bribes.
Part of the evidence presented by US prosecutors indicates that Coronel was at the very least an accomplice in Guzman’s escape from Mexico’s Altiplano prison in 2015.
She has not however been charged with any crime and showed up almost every day in court to be with her husband.
A former right-hand man of the drugs lord said that when Guzman was jailed between 2014 and 2015, he used Coronel’s prison visits to pass messages to accomplices planning his escape via a mile (1.5 kilometer) long tunnel from the shower stall of his cell.
During the trial the prosecution played a recording of a phone call between Coronel and Guzman, in which she passed the telephone to her father. Guzman then informed his father-in-law about an illicit drugs shipment into the US.
“My name was often mentioned and called into question,” admitted Coronel, a tall Mexican-American woman with long dark hair, with whom Guzman has two daughters.
“I can only say that I have done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not perfect, but I consider myself a good human being who never intentionally hurt anyone,” she said.
The US authorities do not allow visits or phone calls between Guzman and his wife. They also forbade the couple from briefly hugging each other in court during the trial.
El Chapo’s wife says drug kingpin is ‘excellent’ husband, father
El Chapo’s wife says drug kingpin is ‘excellent’ husband, father
130 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren freed: government
- The religiously diverse African country of 230 million people is the scene of myriad conflicts that have killed both Christians and Muslims
ABUJA: Nigerian authorities have secured the release of 130 kidnapped schoolchildren taken by gunmen from a Catholic school in November, a presidential spokesman said Sunday, after 100 were freed earlier this month.
“Another 130 abducted Niger state pupils released, none left in captivity,” Sunday Dare said in a post on X, accompanied by a photo of smiling children.
In late November, hundreds of students and staff were kidnapped from St. Mary’s co-educational boarding school in north-central Niger state.
The attack came as the country buckled under a wave of mass abductions reminiscent of the infamous 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls in Chibok.
The west African country suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns, from jihadists in the northeast to armed “bandit” gangs in the northwest.
A UN source told AFP that “the remaining set of girls/secondary school students will be taken to Minna,” the capital of Niger state, on Tuesday.
The exact number of those kidnapped, and those who remain in captivity, has been unclear since the attack on the school, located in the rural hamlet of Papiri.
The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said 315 students and staff were kidnapped.
Some 50 escaped immediately afterwards, and on December 7 the government secured the release of around 100.
That would leave about 165 thought to remain in captivity.
But a statement from President Bola Tinubu at the time put the remaining people being held at 115.
- Spate of mass kidnappings -
It has not been made public who seized the children from their boarding school, or how the government secured their release.
Though kidnappings for ransom are a common way for criminals and armed groups to make quick cash, a spate of mass abductions in November put an uncomfortable spotlight on Nigeria’s already grim security situation.
Assailants across the country kidnapped two dozen Muslim schoolgirls, 38 church worshippers and a bride and her bridesmaids, with farmers, women and children also taken hostage.
The kidnappings came as Nigeria faces a diplomatic offensive from the United States, where President Donald Trump has alleged that there were mass killings of Christians that amounted to a “genocide.”
The Nigerian government and independent analysts reject that framing, which has long been used by the Christian right in the United States and Europe.
The religiously diverse African country of 230 million people is the scene of myriad conflicts that have killed both Christians and Muslims.
