Drug baron's ally on trial for killing of political rival

Colombia has been gripped by a trial that has sent it back into the dark days of Pablo Escobar, when the drug baron ruled much of the country from his stronghold in Medellin.

In the dock, and in front of national television cameras, is Alberto Santofimio, the former justice minister who is charged with plotting to kill a presidential candidate and using the drug cartel's hitmen to do it.

The hearings, billed by local media as the "most transcendent in decades", centre on the assassination of Luis Carlos Galan, who had been widely expected to become president in 1989, until he was gunned down at an election rally in Bogota.

Mr Galan had pledged during his campaign to send drug barons to stand trial in the US, a stance that earned him powerful enemies among Colombia's notorious drug cartels.

Mr Santofimio was arrested in May. The prosecution's star witness is John Jairo Velasquez, known as Popeye, a former hit man employed by Escobar.

Velasquez, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, is the only criminal convicted in connection with the politician's murder who remains alive. Other hit men involved in Mr Galan's murder have been killed. Last year, he issued a damning statement from a maximum security jail, which accused Mr Santofimio of urging Escobar to murder the popular presidential candidate.

On the first day of the trial, the accused and the accuser met in a small nondescript courtroom amid tight security. A confident Velasquez, wearing a bullet-proof vest and holding his published memoirs in one hand, told the courtroom that Mr Santofimio was the, "intellectual author behind the assassination of Galan". Mr Galan's widow and three sons were there.

Throughout the trial, the prosecutor has attempted to prove that Mr Santofimio had close ties with Escobar and said the two met several times. The prosecutor has insisted that Mr Santofimio was, in fact, the "political adviser" to the mafia boss who told him to kill Mr Galan so as to avoid possible extradition to the US. The prosecutor said: "It remains absolutely clear the perverse influence Santofimio had over the criminal mind of Escobar. This was fundamental, definitive and a determining factor in his [Escobar's] decision to assassinate Galan." The prosecutor's case centres around an alleged meeting between Escobar and the former minister in which Velasquez claims Mr Santofimio said: "Kill him, Pablo."

Mr Santofimio has already been implicated in having close dealings with drug traffickers. In 1995, he was convicted of receiving money from drug barons for which he served a four-year prison term.

During the 1980s, Escobar unleashed a bloody reign of terror to pressure the government to prohibit extradition. During this war, police officers, ministers, judges and journalists were murdered along with hundreds of innocents who died in bomb attacks in Medellin and Bogota, orchestrated by the drug cartels. Escobar was hunted down and shot dead by police in December 1993.

The trial wrapped up with Mr Santofimio giving a six-hour monologue, during which he reiterated his innocence and insisted he had broken ties with the cartel years before the assassination.The outcome of the trial rests on whether Velasquez is to be believed or not.

The verdict is not expected for several months.