On the morning of November 27, 1989, Avianca Flight 203 left Bogota for Cali and was destroyed in the air shortly after takeoff, near the capital. All 107 people aboard died, 101 passengers and six crew, and three more people died on the ground. Two of the passengers were citizens of the United States. Those two deaths gave American prosecutors a way into a Colombian case, and the man they brought to trial for it was Dandeny Munoz Mosquera, a Colombian from Medellin whom they portrayed as a hired killer and drug smuggler working for the Medellin cartel of Pablo Escobar.
He was tried twice in 1994 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The first trial ended in a mistrial. At the second, a jury convicted him on all thirteen counts of a superseding indictment: cocaine conspiracy and importation, racketeering and racketeering conspiracy, a continuing criminal enterprise, offenses over the destruction of the aircraft, and the extraterritorial murder of the two American citizens. On May 5, 1995, he was sentenced to ten consecutive life terms. He has always denied any part in the destruction of the plane, and a former chief prosecutor of Colombia told the trial judge before the first trial that the wrong man had been charged. Colombia's own courts convicted a different man of taking part in the attack.
Munoz Mosquera grew up in Medellin. He denies ever having worked for Escobar; in a 2013 radio interview he said he had been a bodyguard for another man in Medellin.
He passed in and out of Colombian custody in the years around the destruction of Flight 203. In July 1988 he was arrested in Medellin and held in a prison there, from which he escaped. He was later recaptured by an army brigade in Antioquia and moved to a prison in Bogota, and in 1991 he escaped again. A court in Santuario had sentenced him to fifty-six months for theft, and when he broke out of the Bogota prison he was serving a sentence for armed robbery. By then Colombian authorities wanted him on charges of homicide, theft and causing personal injury.
Avianca's flight HK-1803, operating as Flight 203, was on the domestic route from Bogota to Cali. It took off from El Dorado airport in Bogota and was destroyed shortly afterward over Soacha, just outside the capital. No one aboard survived. In 2009 Colombian authorities declared the attack a crime against humanity, which removed any time limit on prosecuting it.
In Colombia the attack has been attributed to the Medellin cartel, which hoped to kill the presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, who did not board the flight. The men the Colombian authorities named as the organizers, Escobar and three other cartel leaders, are all dead, and the proceedings against them were closed. Escobar himself had also been indicted in the United States over the flight; he died in 1993 during an operation by Colombian security forces.
In Colombia, the man convicted was Carlos Mario Alzate Urquijo. He surrendered on February 17, 1993, and confessed to thirty crimes, including taking part in the attack on the plane. He served his sentence and left custody on November 27, 2001, twelve years to the day after the flight. By 2019 Colombian prosecutors had no active investigation into the attack.
Munoz Mosquera turned up next in the United States. On September 25, 1991, agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested him in Queens, New York, acting on information from Colombia's judicial police and from the DEA's own sources; Colombian intelligence also passed American investigators evidence that included intercepted recordings. He had flown into New York from Los Angeles the Saturday before and had been in the country a little more than a week. He was carrying a false passport. He gave his age as 24, but fingerprint records from Colombia put it at 39. A federal magistrate ordered him held without bail on a charge of making false statements to a federal agent. At the time it was expected that he would be sent back to Colombia to face the murder and robbery charges pending there.
He was not sent back. The first case against him in New York was a narrow one, built on the false documents and on false information he was accused of giving a federal agent. He was convicted and sentenced in late 1991 and was serving that sentence when the larger case began. Later in 1991 a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York indicted him over Flight 203.
While he was awaiting trial in a federal jail in New York, he was accused of trying to escape. The episode was not treated as a side matter. Prosecutors charged it as an overt act in the fourth superseding indictment, and the jury at the second trial heard evidence about it.
The final indictment ran to thirteen counts and reached well beyond the plane. It charged a conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine and a substantive count of cocaine importation under the federal drug laws, 21 U.S.C. §§ 963, 846, 952(a) and 960(a)(1). It charged racketeering and racketeering conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c) and (d), and a continuing criminal enterprise under 21 U.S.C. § 848(a), all arising from his activities with the Medellin cartel. The conspiracy allegations took in other attacks in Colombia as well, among them the one on the headquarters of the DAS, the Colombian security service, in Bogota.
The counts on Flight 203 itself came under two separate statutes. The first set, 18 U.S.C. §§ 32(b)(2), 32(b)(3) and 371, covered the offenses against the airliner and the conspiracy to commit them. The second set, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2332(a)(1) and 2332(b)(2), covered the killing of United States nationals outside the United States. It was those two American deaths, out of 110, that supported the murder counts. The other passengers, the crew and the three people on the ground were not the subject of separate murder counts in the American case.
The first trial opened in the spring of 1994 before a United States district judge in the Eastern District of New York. It began under a cloud. On the eve of the trial, the attorney general of Colombia wrote to the judge to say that his office had no evidence linking Munoz Mosquera to the attack, that the wrong person had been charged, and that the person responsible was already in custody in Colombia and had confessed. The defense, citing the claims of the imprisoned Colombian, asked for a postponement. The request was denied.
The letter set off a chain of events inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The prosecutor asked the FBI agent working on the case for his view of the confessor's account. On June 4, 1994, the agent consulted an examiner in the FBI Laboratory, who on June 7 wrote a memorandum questioning parts of the technical analysis. The memorandum reached the prosecutor on June 9. She told the examiner that it would have to be disclosed to the defense under the rule requiring prosecutors to turn over evidence favorable to the accused. The government's later investigators could not confirm that it was disclosed, though the trial prosecutors believed it had been handed over during the trial.
The agent testified on June 7, 1994, largely as a summary witness who drew together the work of others: Colombian investigators, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. The trial ended in a mistrial.
The government tried him again that fall in the same court. The second trial lasted more than eight weeks and heard more than forty witnesses, about twenty of them cooperating witnesses for the government. The defense did not dispute that the plane had been destroyed deliberately. Its case was that Munoz Mosquera had nothing to do with it, and it rested on attacking the credibility of the cooperating witnesses.
The confessor in Colombia never testified. American agents had interviewed him there, under strict limits on what they could ask, and the prosecution maintained that the sworn testimony of the cooperating witnesses contradicted his claim to have acted alone. The FBI agent returned to the stand on November 22, 1994, and gave essentially the same testimony as before.
The trial judge had ruled that counsel should refer to the earlier trial only as a "prior proceeding." The jury also saw two videotapes, one shot by a photographer whom the government did not call, and heard testimony about a radio report on the destruction of the plane, offered to explain how the American investigation had proceeded. The defense had asked for public money to hire an investigator under the Criminal Justice Act. The judge refused.
The defense summed up on December 15, 1994. The jury then found Munoz Mosquera guilty on all thirteen counts. In February 1995 the United States Attorneys' Bulletin listed the conviction among the cases of the Eastern District of New York.
On Friday, May 5, 1995, the judge sentenced him to ten consecutive terms of life imprisonment, followed by three further consecutive terms totaling 540 months. He was also given consecutive terms of supervised release adding up to 64 years and special assessments totaling $650. When he spoke in the courtroom, it was only to say that God and the government knew he was innocent. The judgment was entered on May 16, 1995.
The case set two legal firsts. It was the first conviction under a 1956 federal law that made the bombing of an aircraft a crime, and the first use of a 1986 antiterrorism statute covering the killing of American citizens abroad.
He appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and on May 9, 1996, a three-judge panel decided the case by summary order, a form of decision the court did not treat as precedent.
The panel took the defense's points one at a time. On the investigator, it held that he had not shown that the paralegal staff available to his lawyers could not do the work, and that most of what he wanted investigated concerned documents or evidence that might never have existed. The request was, in the panel's view, a fishing expedition, and refusing it was no abuse of discretion.
The statements of Medellin cartel members that witnesses had repeated at trial drew no objection when they were offered, so the court reviewed them only for plain error. It found them admissible as statements of co-conspirators made during and in furtherance of the conspiracy, and some of them as his own statements or as admissions he had adopted.
The videotapes, the court said, were not hearsay at all, because pictures are not assertions. The testimony about the radio report had not been offered for its truth but to explain the course of the American investigation, and its value outweighed any unfair prejudice. The tapes had been adequately authenticated even without the photographer. The evidence of the escape attempt was direct proof of an overt act charged in the indictment, so the rule that limits evidence of a defendant's other acts did not apply. The instruction to call the first trial a "prior proceeding" was within the judge's discretion.
On one point the defense won. The two drug conspiracy counts, the panel held, were lesser included offenses of the continuing criminal enterprise count, and a defendant cannot be punished separately for both. The court vacated the sentences on the two conspiracy counts, though not the convictions, and combined the convictions on the three counts. It ordered that the vacated sentences would come back into force only if the sentence on the enterprise count were itself vacated and not reimposed at a greater severity. The rest of the judgment was affirmed, including the ten life terms.
The case was drawn into a wider review that the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General conducted of the FBI Laboratory, published in April 1997. The examiner who had written the June 1994 memorandum had raised complaints about the laboratory's work in several cases, and Flight 203 was one of them.
On the FBI agent who testified at both trials, the inspector general concluded that he had not committed perjury, fabricated evidence or intended to mislead the court. It found that parts of his testimony were scientifically unsound or beyond his expertise, that his account of the laboratory results was incomplete, and that he had slightly overstated his experience. It also found that the examiner's own memorandum was seriously flawed and that it tended to create problems for the agent, the FBI and the prosecution in the middle of a trial. Two supervisors were faulted for not resolving the dispute between the two men. The inspector general did not decide whether any of this affected the verdict; on the omission of the memorandum's points from the second trial, it said only that the effect may have been insignificant.
The prosecutors answered the draft report in writing. In a letter dated February 13, 1997, the United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York argued that the inspector general had not reviewed the full trial record, the testimony of the other experts, or the Colombian and American aviation reports, and that the technical questions did not matter to either side's case. The only point in dispute at trial, the office said, was whether Munoz Mosquera had a role in what happened, not how the aircraft was brought down. A former prosecutor on the case, by then a federal magistrate judge, wrote in the same vein on March 7, 1997.
Munoz Mosquera has spent the decades since in federal custody. In January 1993, more than a year after his arrest and long before his trial, he was moved to a maximum-security federal prison in Illinois. From 1995 to 2010 he was held in a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado, locked in his cell about twenty-three hours a day, and in 2010 he was transferred to a medium-security prison, later one in Virginia. In February 2024 he was held in a high-security federal penitentiary in California, serving the life terms imposed in 1995.
Colombia did not forget him. In August 2002 a court in Medellin convicted him of homicide in a separate Colombian case, a sentence that has not been carried out.
He has given few interviews. In 2013 he told a Colombian radio station that the authorities had gone looking for false witnesses and convicted him on their word, and he has kept to that position. In 2024 his lawyers said they meant to challenge the conviction again and seek his release.
The central dispute is whether Munoz Mosquera had any role in the destruction of Flight 203. The American jury found that he did, on the strength of more than forty witnesses, about twenty of them cooperators. The Colombian attorney general's letter of spring 1994 said the responsible man was already in custody and had confessed, and Colombia's courts went on to convict Alzate Urquijo, not Munoz Mosquera, of taking part in the attack. In the American case the confessor never testified, and the prosecution argued that the cooperators contradicted his account.
The second point concerns the technical evidence. The inspector general found errors in the testimony of the FBI agent at both trials but found no perjury, no fabrication and no intent to mislead, and did not decide whether the errors mattered to the verdict. The prosecution's position was that the technical evidence was beside the point, because the defense never disputed that the plane had been destroyed deliberately.
The record also disagrees on smaller points. His first arrest in Medellin is dated July 1988 in one Colombian account and August 1988 in another, and his arrest in Queens is placed on September 25, 1991, in contemporaneous reports and on September 24 in a later profile. The sentence on the false-identity charges is given as five years, imposed in November 1991, in one account and as six years in two others.
The third point is the wider portrait of him. At the time of his arrest he was wanted in Colombia on homicide and other charges, and prosecutors in New York presented him as a hired killer for the cartel. Apart from the Medellin homicide conviction of 2002 and the federal racketeering counts, that portrait has not been tested in court.
July 1988: Arrested in Medellin; later escapes from custody.
November 27, 1989: Avianca Flight 203 is destroyed over Soacha after leaving El Dorado airport in Bogota for Cali; 107 aboard and three on the ground die, among them two U.S. citizens.
1991: Escapes from a prison in Bogota.
September 25, 1991: Arrested by the DEA in Queens, New York, carrying a false passport.
Late 1991: Convicted on false-identity charges and sentenced (five years per one account, six per others); indicted in the Eastern District of New York over Flight 203.
January 1993: Moved to a maximum-security federal prison in Illinois.
February 17, 1993: Carlos Mario Alzate Urquijo surrenders in Colombia and confesses to taking part in the attack.
Spring 1994: The attorney general of Colombia writes to the trial judge that the wrong man has been charged; a defense request to postpone is denied.
June 1994: First trial; an FBI laboratory memorandum dated June 7 reaches the prosecutor on June 9; the trial ends in a mistrial.
Fall 1994: Second trial in the Eastern District of New York, more than eight weeks and over forty witnesses.
December 1994: After the defense summation on December 15, the jury convicts him on all thirteen counts.
May 5, 1995: Sentenced to ten consecutive life terms plus 540 months, the first conviction under the 1956 aircraft-bombing law; judgment entered May 16.
May 9, 1996: The Second Circuit vacates the sentences on two conspiracy counts and otherwise affirms.
1995 to 2010: Held in a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado.
April 1997: The Justice Department's Inspector General publishes its FBI Laboratory report, including the Flight 203 case.
November 27, 2001: Alzate Urquijo leaves custody in Colombia after serving his sentence.
August 2002: A Medellin court convicts Munoz Mosquera of homicide in a separate case.
2009: Colombia declares the attack on Flight 203 a crime against humanity.
2010: Transferred to a medium-security federal prison.
February 2024: Held in a high-security federal penitentiary in California; his lawyers say they will seek his release.