BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) – Colombia’s top drug lord was captured yesterday, officials said, announcing the arrest of a man accused of offering his assassins a $1,000 bounty for each police officer they killed.

Daniel Rendon Herrera, alias “Don Mario”, was arrested in the northern Colombian city of Apartado in a raid involving 300 police, presidential spokesman Cesar Velasquez told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Brazil.

In Washington, Drug Enforcement Administration Chief of Intelligence Anthony Placido said Rendon Herrera is wanted in the United States on drug-trafficking charges and that the US government would seek his extradition to New York for trial.

Colombian officials had offered a reward of up to $2 million for information leading to the capture of Rendon Herrera, 43, who police say is the leading figure in Colombia’s drug-trafficking, right-wing paramilitary groups.

Police have accused Rendon Herrera of offering a bounty of $1,000 for each police officer his assassins killed.

Colombia’s paramilitary groups are far-right militias that formed in the 1980s, initially to counter kidnapping and extortion by leftist rebels, but they eventually evolved into regional mafias.

Prosecutors say they committed well over 10,000 murders and stole millions of acres of land, often in collusion with local political, business and military leaders.

President Alvaro Uribe, who is attending the World Economic Forum for Latin America in Rio de Janeiro, also announced the capture without citing Rendon Herrera by name.

Uribe told reporters that authorities had captured “one of the most feared drug traffickers in the world … after long months of patient pursuit”.