He had been concealing himself in his birthplace of Medellín, where Pablo Escobar was fatally wounded in the cranium while endeavoring to escape across the rooftops of the neighborhood Los Olivos on December 2, 1993.

In Medellín, a phone call originating from a middle-class neighborhood was intercepted by a Colombian electronic surveillance team. Since his escape from La Catedral prison, the narcotics kingpin had been pursued for 16 months by the Search Bloc, a specialized unit of the Colombian National Police focused on locating and apprehending Escobar.

When the call abruptly ended, it appeared that Escobar was aware of being under suspicion. The authorities quickly identified the caller as Escobar, as he had dialed his son’s number, Juan Pablo Escobar.

As the authorities closed in, Escobar and his bodyguard Alvaro de Jesus Agudelo, also known as “El Limón,” escaped across the rooftops.

Pablo Escobar was killed by gunshots to the ear, torso, and leg. Escobar and El Limón turned as their shooting came to an end. They opened fire as the Search Bloc ran towards them. Their goal was behind a row of houses on the side of the street.

“Long live Colombia!” A soldier from the Search Bloc shouted as the gunfire died down. “We have just eliminated Pablo Escobar!”

On top of the barrio rooftop, the lifeless and bloodied corpse of Pablo Escobar is sprawled. The Search Bloc members and a group of cheerful Colombian police officials are standing nearby. This gruesome aftermath has been forever etched in history through a captured image.

The final confrontation was influenced by adversaries of Escobar, a vigilante organization composed of Los Pepes, although there were speculations. The demise of Escobar was attributed to and widely commemorated by the Bloc Search Party.

According to released CIA documents in 2008, General Antonio Miguel Padilla Gomez, the national director of the Colombian police, had worked closely with Fidel Castano, a paramilitary leader and rival to Escobar and Los Pepes, in the intelligence gathering of a certain matter.

However, the Colombian police refused to believe that Pablo Escobar himself had been shot, insisting that he would have made sure it was on his own terms. There were also rumors that the drug lord had been taken down by the Colombian police, but the Escobar family refused to believe in those particular rumors.

The two brothers of Escobar insisted that his death had been a suicide, claiming that the fatal wound’s location was proof that it had been self-inflicted.

Brother one said, “If he was really cornered without a way out, he would say to me every day that he would ‘shoot himself’ through the ear.”

He passed away in accordance with his own preferences — if the general public discovered, there was a possibility of a media frenzy instead of finding solace in the knowledge of his departure. The true source of the bullet that ended his life remains unknown, whether the Colombian Police were unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of Pablo Escobar’s suicide or they were simply content with his absence.