Jaime Galindo, the former officer of the Mexican Federal Police, who was freed last week after being accused of being an accomplice in the 2015 escape by notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, told Sputnik Mundo that he had been overflown with emotions after the release.
“I thought I was going to stay [in jail] again. I thought that the Prosecutor's Office was not going to allow me to get out of there,” Galindo said, thanking Sputnik for adding to him being freed.
The interview followed the release of the ex-police officer on April 15 under the written pledge not to leave country.
After seven years and almost eight months of being locked up in a maximum security prison, Galindo reunited with his family in Mexico City. Judicial proceedings against him, however, are underway and he has yet to be acquitted.
Galindo was among seven corrections officers who were charged with involvement in the escape of Guzman, considered to be one of the world’s most powerful drug traffickers, in July 2015.
Guzman escaped from a maximum security prison through a tunnel that surfaced in his cell and ran 1.5 km (0.9 miles) to a building outside the prison walls.
Mexican authorities recaptured him in January 2016, extraditing the drug lord to the US a year later. In 2019, Guzman was found guilty of a spate of criminal charges related to his leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, thought to have been responsible for much of Mexico's trafficking of drugs to the US. “El Chapo” was finally sentenced to life imprisonment and is doing his term at the ADX Florence federal prison in Colorado, the US.