Drug cartel

Turkish, Spanish and French police forces dismantled an international drug cartel, capturing the mob's wanted leader in Spain in a joint operation, Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya has announced.

Mexico's government has acknowledged that at least two well-known Mayan ruin sites are unreachable by visitors because of a toxic mix of cartel violence and land disputes.

Police in violence-plagued Ecuador arrested 68 people Sunday who had attempted to take over a hospital in the country's southwest in the midst of a "war" between drug gangs and the security forces.

Ecuador's armed forces were engaged in a brutal standoff with organized crime Thursday, deploying more than 22,400 soldiers to put down a campaign of terror waged by gangs that has claimed 16 lives.

The special state prosecutor's offices in Podgorica, Montenegro. Photo: EPA/BORIS PEJOVIC

Montenegrin police director assistant Dejan Knezevic in his office in Podgorica. Photo: Government of Montenegro

Knezevic was arrested as part of a large-scale investigation of police links with the notorious Kavac drug gang, which has led to 12 current and ex-police officers' arrests and to national warrants for the arrest of three others.

Istanbul police have caught the leader of the Comanchero, one of the leading drug gangs in Australia, sought with red notice.

Duax Ngakuru, against whom a search warrant was issued at the international level was caught in his villa in the Sarıyer district.

Police await official confirmation of reports on Thursday that Jovan Vukotic, the alleged head of the notorious Skaljari drug gang, was killed in Turkey.

Five people died and 16 were injured in an explosion Sunday in the Ecuadoran port city of Guayaquil in an attack the government blamed on organized crime, officials said.

President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency in the country's second largest city of Guayaquil, where eight houses and two cars were destroyed in the blast.

The excitement was understandable. Dairo Antonio Usuga, better known in Colombia as 'Otoniel', was the country's most wanted drug trafficker, a former guerrilla turned leader of El Clan del Golfo, the biggest criminal gang in Colombia. 

He was arrested in late October, 500 soldiers and 22 helicopters descending on his rural hideout in northwestern Colombia.