to the mayor Abelardo Romero Hernandez his uniform was stained 8 years ago when -according to the Prosecutor’s Office- he decided to join “The magnificent”, a group of former members of the Police who, among other crimes, were in charge of profiling and targeting people, especially businessmen, so that the ELN would kidnap them.
The task of which they accuse “the Sergeant”, as he was known in the underworld, seemed simple: appear before some millionaire wearing his police suit, pull out a bogus warrant, fake an arrest, and deliver it to your direct contact.
According to the file, it was “Mono Clinton”, a former ELN leader who was captured in 2020 for kidnapping for extortion.
In this way, he became a key file in this network of corruption within the Police and for which he lost his position as mayor.
According to the dossier that raised the Directorate of Prosecutors against Organized Crime, “El Sargento” was the one who selected the “kidnapped prospects” for collect ransoms in dollars to finance the maintenance of the ELN.
One of the “little jobs” in which he was successful and for which Romero Sánchez is now being prosecuted occurred on April 27, 2015 in Copacabana, Antioquia. The ELN already had a file on a farmer whom “the Sergeant” contacted to offer him a new property that he could rent on weekends.
When the businessman came to the door to close the business, Romero took out his police skills and put together the necessary paraphernalia so that the farmer would not suspect a kidnapping, as had happened with a previous victim.
He issued a false arrest warrant for the alleged crime of reception and, against the will of the farmer, put him in a car and then transferred him to the trunk of another car, covering his head with a bag. His final fate was in the hands of Édgar Humberto Restrepo Benjumea, alias Mono Clinton, who at that time was a member of the Staff and coordinator of the ELN Urban War Front.
The farmer spent three days in a farm in Copacabana north of the capital of Antioquia, sleeping in a wooden box lined with styrofoam, and then he was transferred in another vehicle to the village La Clara, in the municipality of Caldas.
there he remained 17 months locked in a 3 x 3 meter septic tank with two video cameras to monitor him and a plastic bucket to relieve himself.
The reward loot was negotiated with the family through emails for 15 months and they demanded 2,800 million pesos of which the kidnappers managed to collect 2,200 million pesos in cash before his release on September 11, 2016.
Two years later, in June 2018, “Los Magníficos” began to fall one by one, although they tried to divert the investigations several times.
In the midst of the investigations, five former police officers signed a principle of opportunity and his statements were essential to catch “Mono Clinton” in 2019 and sentence him to 40 years in prison.
But the framework did not end there, the Prosecutor’s Office continued the investigations until this Monday they managed to find the whereabouts of Romero Hernández, who at that time was attached to the surveillance police and was performing public space recovery functions in Medellín.
For that reason “El Sergeant” was charged with the crime of aggravated extortion kidnapping, but pleaded not guilty. However, a guarantee control judge imposed a measure of insurance in a prison until the end of his judicial process.