Fugitive drug lord arrested near Jamaican capital: police

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This article was published 23/06/2010 (5951 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Reputed gang leader Christopher "Dudus" Coke, who eluded a bloody police offensive in his slum stronghold last month, was arrested Tuesday by authorities outside Jamaica’s capital, the island’s top cop said.

Coke has been called one of the world’s most dangerous drug lords by U.S. authorities and faces trial in New York on drug and arms trafficking charges. His arrest came nearly a month after 76 people were killed during a four-day assault by police and soldiers on the West Kingston slum of Tivoli Gardens, Coke’s base that was defended by his armed followers.

Police Commissioner Owen Ellington said Coke was in good condition in police custody. He said Coke was captured by police manning a vehicle checkpoint along a highway, but said other "circumstances of (Coke’s) arrest are being investigated."

The Rev. Al Miller, an influential evangelical preacher who facilitated the surrender of Coke’s brother earlier this month, told The Associated Press that Coke was prepared to surrender to authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Kingston when police stopped his convoy on a highway outside the capital.

Miller said police captured Coke on the way to the embassy and then took him to the nearby Spanish Town police headquarters. He was then flown to Kingston, the preacher said.

Last month, a U.S. law enforcement official in New York told The Associated Press a lawyer for Coke was in negotiations with the U.S. Justice Department about his client’s possible safe removal to New York to face charges.

Coke is said to fear suffering the same fate as his father, a gang leader known as Jim Brown, who died in a prison fire in 1992 while awaiting extradition to the U.S. on drug charges.

The police commissioner said Jamaica’s threat level for security forces was elevated and he appealed to the "families, friends and sympathizers of Christopher Coke to remain calm and to allow the law to take its course."

Ellington said legal proceedings against Coke would get underway quickly.

Coke’s father was the leader of the Shower Posse gang, a cocaine-trafficking band with agents in Jamaica and the U.S. that began operating in the 1980s and was named for its members’ tendency to spray victims with bullets.

 

— The Associated Press