Argentinian police on Saturday captured a fugitive prisoner convicted of drug-related killings as a manhunt entered a 13th day for two others, a security source said.  The manhunt has gripped Argentina and shone a light on the country’s growing role as a transit point for narco gangs smuggling South American drugs to the US and Europe.  In an operation carried live at times by television channels, hundreds of security agents including police commandos and sharpshooters hunted down the men in the farming province of Santa Fe, north of the capital, Buenos Aires.  Víctor Schialli and brothers Martín and Cristian Lanatta had been on the run since escaping from a maximum security jail on 27 December.  “Martín Lanatta has been detained,” said the security source, withholding his name because he was unauthorized to speak publicly before an official statement from the interior ministry.  State news agency Telam reported Martín Lanatta was taken outside the town of Cayasta, 354 miles north of the capital, after the vehicle the three were travelling in flipped over. The other two men escaped on foot, Telam said.  The trio were convicted over the 2008 killing of three businessmen in the pharmaceutical industry who were allegedly linked to an ephedrine trafficking gang, in a high-profile case dubbed “the triple murder”. Ephedrine is used for the production of methamphetamine.  A blame game over the prison break erupted between the country’s new leader, Mauricio Macri, and officials in the government of the former president, Cristina Fernández.  “Drug-trafficking has grown in the last decade like never before in our country because of the inaction or complicity of the last government,” Macri said this week, vowing to take on the traffickers.  The manhunt intensified on Thursday after the fugitives opened fire on a group of police officers who stopped their vehicle. Two agents were wounded.  TV footage showed police helicopters scouring swaths of cornfields and commandos snaking through wooded copses as federal and provincial police closed the dragnet on the fugitives.
Brothers escape on foot after car overturns leading to arrest of associate as widely publicised search for convicted murderers enters 13th day