The death of Édgar Páez, president of the Tigres club, from the second division of Colombian soccer, shook Colombian soccer again. The leader received three gunshot wounds after leaving a game of his team at the Metropolotano de Techo stadium, in Bogotá.
Páez was attacked by two hitmen on a motorcycle. He received three gunshot wounds, in the neck, skull and thorax, when he was driving a red Mazda 2 in the company of his daughter. He was transferred to the Méderi clinic, where he arrived without vital signs.
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Tigres issued a statement this Saturday in which it regretted the murder of its top leader. “The Tigres family and the sports community are devastated by this event. Édgar Páez Cortés was a passionate defender of football and an exemplary leader. “His commitment to the team and his dedication to the development of sport in our region left an indelible mark on everyone who had the privilege of knowing him,” the document says.
Who was Édgar Páez, leader of Tigres?
Páez was 63 years old and was the president of the club since it took that name, in 2016, instead of Expreso Rojo. In his first season he surprised by achieving promotion to the first division thanks to a combination of results that left Deportivo Pereira out.
Tigres only lasted one year in the A and at the end of 2017 they were relegated to the second division, where they play to this day, occupying the penultimate place in the table.
Before arriving in Tigres, Páez was a DAS detective and an investigator for the Prosecutor’s Office. According to the newspaper El Espectador, he was sentenced to seven months in prison for the crime of negligent injuries.
That same medium indicated that at the time he was approached as an investor in Independiente Santa Fe by the current president of the club, Eduardo Méndez, in his first step in office, between 2004 and 2007.
It was the same time in which, as revealed by the Investigative Unit of EL TIEMPO in July 2021, money from drug trafficking had permeated the popular capital club.
“From the United States it was pointed out that (Julio) Lozano Pirateque, Claudio Javier Silva Otálora and (Luis) Caicedo Velandia had ties to the capital’s soccer team and to the laundering of 1.5 billion dollars. The mechanism would have been the false sale of emeralds and the investments of front men who penetrated the club,” it was then revealed.
Silva was murdered in November 2022 in the town of Barrios Unidos, while Caicedo Velandia, who was also a CTI investigator, was also shot, in the Paulo VI sector, in July 2021.
Juan Francisco Caicedo Velandia, Luis’s brother, was also a victim of homicide on February 10. The Investigative Unit of EL TIEMPO said that these crimes were part of a mafia vendetta in Bogotá, which had already claimed the lives of 15 people up to that point.
The authorities, until now, have not revealed any link between these murders and the homicide of Páez Cortés, which occurred this Saturday.
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2023-09-24 04:52:30
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