Pablo Escobar’s nephew finds £14m cash hidden in wall of drug lord’s house

Nicolás Escobar said the smell of the decayed cash was "astonishing"

Credit: AFP 

Pablo Escobar’s nephew said he has found £14 million worth of cash stashed in the wall of one of the infamous drug lord’s homes. 

Nicolás Escobar told Colombian media that "a vision" inspired him to look for the money in his apartment in the city of Medellín, where he has lived for the last five years.

He said it was not the first time he had discovered hordes of cash which his uncle had hidden decades earlier from the authorities. 

Escobar, who was killed in a police shootout in 1993, was believed to be the seventh richest person on the planet at the peak of his drug-dealing career and rumours of his hidden fortunes have circulated in Medellín since his death.

Nicolás Escobar told Colombian TV network Red+ Noticias he had also found a typewriter, satellite phones, gold pen, a camera and a film roll which has yet to be developed.

"Every time I sat in the dining room and looked towards the car park, I saw a man entering the place and disappearing," he said.

Pablo Escobar's nephew said it is not the first time he has discovered stores of cash 

Credit: Eric VANDEVILLE /Getty

"The smell [inside] was astonishing. A smell 100 times worse than something that had died," he added, describing how some of the banknotes had decayed over the years and were no longer usable.

Nicolás recounted his relationship with his uncle, even describing one instance in which he was once kidnapped by people who were trying to discover Escobar’s whereabouts. 

"I was tortured for seven hours," he said, and "two of my workers were attacked with a chainsaw."

Escobar gained notoriety after he established a drug cartel in Medellín in the 1970s which, at its peak, supplied an estimated 80 per cent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States.

The drug kingpin’s wealth saw him listed in the Forbes list of global billionaires seven times.  He used his vast cash reserves to fund his lifestyle after escaping prison in 1992, but was finally killed in Medellín in 1993.