International fugitive, arms trader and death squad leader, Yair Klein, has arrived in Israel a free man, despite warrants for his arrest in Colombia for training the death squads of the notorious Medellin drug cartel.Klein was captured in Russia and held in a Russian prison awaiting extradition to Colombia when Israeli authorities intervened to secure his release to Israel, where he will be harbored illegally by Israeli authorities.
The Israeli government has a history of harboring fugitives – for example U.S. citizen Samuel Sheinbein, who brutally murdered and dismembered a man in the suburbs of Washington DC, then escaped to Israel in the late 1990s.
In Klein’s case, their is substantial evidence that he trained and assisted death squads in torture and murder techniques in Colombia. These death squads were part of the Medellin drug cartel, run by Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.
Klein has also worked as an international arms dealer, and served a sentence in Sierra Leone in 1999 for illegally smuggling weapons to right-wing guerrilla armies. This took place in the height of a brutal war over resources in which guerrillas recruited child soldiers and engaged in systematic chopping off of limbs of victims throughout Sierra Leone.
