MEXICO CITY: The safe house of drug lord ‘El Chapo’ Guzman has been given away to a mystery winner in a special lottery organised by the Mexican government.
The safe house owned by the drug lord ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who is currently serving a life sentence in US prison, became famous after he narrowly avoided arrest during a raid in 2014.
According to reports, the government had organised the National Lottery grand draw to give away 20 impounded properties of El Chapo. It emerged that the lottery tickets were sold for $12.
The Mexican government gave away El Chapo’s safe house located in Sinaloa’s Culiacan to the National Lottery grand draw’s winner holding ticket number 1,438,619, however, the winner’s identity remained a secret.
The drug lord had reportedly escaped a manhunt in 2014 through an underground drainage system of the safe house that was estimated to be worth $181,000. Later, ‘El Chapo’ Guzman had been arrested after six days.
In 2015, El Chapo had managed to escape from a top-security prison.
El Chapo had been arrested again in 2016 and extradited to the United States (US) in 2017. Before giving away the safe house in the lottery, the authorities made some changes to the property.
Surveillance cameras that covered every angle of the modest home’s exterior have been removed along with a hole under a bathtub that the drug lord slipped through to reach a network of tunnels, according to Sky News.
The country’s Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People (INDEP) has also given it a fresh coat of white paint and tiled over the spot in the bathroom where the tub and tunnel entry-point had been.
In the same lottery, the mansion worth about $3.8 million of former Juarez cartel leader Amado Carrillo Fuentes in Mexico City was put among the other prizes.
The head of the body in charge of managing confiscated properties, Ernesto Prieto said that the aim of the lottery was to turn “onerous properties with heavy maintenance costs” into “a tangible benefit for society”.
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