El Chapo Killed? Drug Lord May Have Died in Shootout

By Emma Koonse, Christian Post Reporter Friday, February 22, 2013

El Chapo, deemed the world's most powerful drug lord, may have been killed in a gun battle in Guatemala on Thursday.

Authorities suspect that Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was killed during a shootout between drug gangs in a rural part of Peten, Guatemala, according to Yahoo News.

Officials are stressing that they have not yet found the body Mexico's most-wanted drug lord, nor have they confirmed that the shootout even took place.

"We have to wait for all technical information in order to determine if, in fact, one of the dead is of Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman," government spokesperson Francisco Cuevas told Guatevision Television.

The search has continued into Friday, with police and soldiers on foot and in the air scouring the scene of the reported gunfight. Reports indicate that at least two men died in Peten, which lies near the border of Mexico. The area has become a battleground between two drug gangs in recent months, reported AP.

It is believed that local residents first reported the gunfight, and Interior Department spokeswoman Carla Herrera said that one of the victims physically resembled El Chapo, according to AP. Subsequently, she asked the Mexican government to provide Guzman's fingerprints in order to compare them to the man found dead on the scene.

Nevertheless, Herrera's overseer at the Interior Department Lopez Bonilla said that it was residents of the town of San Francisco that first reported the gun battle as well as Guzman's alleged death.

"The fact is we don't have any of this information confirmed," Bonilla told AP.

Guzman, or El Chapo, is one of the world's most dangerous and wanted fugitives as well as one of the most wealthy.