Gangs prey on tourists with deadly ‘zombie' drug

Telegraph

24-05-2025

Colombian gangs are using a deadly drug once used by the CIA as a truth serum to kidnap and rob Western tourists.
Dubbed Devil's Breath, the drug scopolamine is derived from the seeds of the Borrachero tree and is also known as burundanga.
In potent doses of 10mg or more, it can paralyse its victims, rendering them highly suggestible to commands as they are placed in a 'zombie'-like state.
The gangs will ensnare tourists by promising them a night of passion in messages sent over dating apps such as Tinder or the LGBT platform Grindr.
After leading them to a secluded setting, the victim is offered a drink, or even a stick of chewing gum or a cigarette, that is laced with the colourless and odourless drug.
Cases have also been reported of victims being injected using incredibly fine needles that leave no trace of an entry wound.
As the chemical cocktail works its way through their nervous system over the next 30 minutes, the victim is assailed with hallucinations, delirium and starts to lose control of their limbs.
Sprawled helplessly on the bed or couch, their captors drain their accounts, rummage through their wallets or prise pieces of jewellery from their fingers and wrists.
Those who start reacting erratically or try to resist are often hit over the head, according to Agustin Guerrero Salcedo, a leading toxicologist from Barranquilla with 40 years of experience treating such incidents.
Police fear this is the fate that befell Alessando Coatti, a 38-year-old Italian scientist who went missing while on holiday in the coastal city of Santa Marta last month.
Detectives believe the molecular biologist, who worked in London, was lured to an abandoned house in the San José del Pando neighbourhood after being contacted over the Grindr dating app.
What exactly happened on the evening of April 4 remains unclear but post-mortem examinations concluded that Coatti was killed by blunt-force trauma.
His body was then dismembered and stuffed into suitcases and bags strewn across the city in an apparent attempt to trick investigators into believing it was a gangland-style hit involving warring drug clans.
'It does something to your brain where you forget completely … it's like a vacuum,' recalled Fernando, a 64-year-old British financial analyst who believes he was drugged with Devil's Breath while on a business trip to Bogota in 2012.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the retired father of two, currently living in Spain, told The Telegraph he was duped into withdrawing around €1,000 with two separate credit cards after his beer was spiked during a night out at a bar near his hotel.
He woke up the next afternoon at 1pm with next to no recollection of what had occurred the night before.
Fernando said was forced to rely on the hotel receptionist to piece together the fragments of what happened that evening.
He could only recall being approached by someone at a bar and then, according to the hotel staff, was picked up by a sympathetic taxi driver who came across him wandering in a daze along the streets of a shady neighbourhood of Bogota.
'You do anything they say'
'It's very dangerous because you're totally hypnotised, you do anything they say,' Fernando said. 'The next day I went to work and told people what happened to me. They suggested I go get tested, and it turned out I had been drugged
'I don't remember much, I just have glimpses of vague instances of walking along the streets and stumbling over my feet.
'Since then I have never accepted [random] drinks or left my drink alone: I think that's what had happened, I had probably gone to the toilet and let my beer down.'
Fernando explained that because he left one of his cards in the hotel safe, it means he was made to go back to the hotel and collect it while possibly intoxicated on Devil's Breath.
'I had gone back into my hotel, during the time in which I was on burundanga and, on my own, taken a card and gone out again.'
Fernando informed police of the incident but claimed the dismissive manner in which they treated his complaint suggested such thefts were very commonplace.
Drug singled out in travel warning
Cases have become so prevalent in Colombia that the US embassy in Bogota singled out scopolamine in a security warning to tourists in June 2023 over the dangers of meeting people through online dating.
Many cases go unreported out of embarrassment and a reluctance to engage with police or judicial authorities.
Tourist cities of Medellin, Cartagena, and Bogota were singled out as hotspots.
Thefts committed against foreign visitors to Medellin in the last three months of 2023 had risen by 200 per cent compared with the previous year, city authorities said.
Violent deaths of foreign visitors, most of which were US citizens, had increased 29 per cent.
In January last year the US embassy disclosed that there had been eight deaths of its citizens attributed to involuntary drugging overdose or suspected homicides between November 1 and December 31 2023.
In the first case of its kind in the UK, Diana Cristea, then 19, together with her boyfriend Joel Osei, used Devil's Breath to poison and rob Adrian Murphy, an Irish dancer, in June 2019 after befriending him over Grindr.
Toxicology reports showed Murphy had died from an overdose of the drug.
Cristea, of Mill Hill, north London, and Osei, then 25, were both found guilty of murder following a trial at Croydon Crown Court.
They were also convicted of poisoning a second man with the same drug two days earlier.
The victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, survived, but was taken to hospital after being found by a neighbour almost naked, extremely agitated and confused.
Cristea was jailed for 16 years and handed a life sentence. Osei was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 32 years.
The National Crime Agency, Britain's equivalent of the FBI, said there was little evidence of scopolamine being used in the UK but that they were monitoring cases.
How the drug works
Prof Kamyar Afarinkia, a lecturer on drug toxicology from the University of West London, said that a backstreet chemist with as much knowledge as a second year university student would be able to extract scopolamine with 90 per cent purity from a Borrachero tree and manufacture it for use with only a few readily available chemicals.
Explaining the ease with which it can be administered, he said: 'If it's sprayed onto the face and if it's not cleaned properly, then it gets into your bloodstream fairly easily.
'It can also be given, for example, in fruit juice...if it's given in grapefruit juice it's a lot more effective because grapefruit juice stops the metabolism of the drug in the body.
'You can get a business card, soak it in, let it dry and then give it to somebody and then when they touch it would obviously be under their skin unless they go and wash their hands very quickly.'
Prof Afarinkia added: 'In these cases it causes a very strange state when people basically accept everything that is said to them.
'Scopolomaine belongs to a class of so-called 'truth serums' that you may have heard about in spy novels and basically that means people are open to suggestions.
'So if they said 'can you tell me the latest secrets', people volunteer it, they wouldn't actually remember it afterwards.'
Dr Sarah Cockbill, a retired consultant pharmacist who has acted as an expert witness in medical legal cases for the past 13 years, said the severity of symptoms depended on the dosage, the health and age of the victim and whether any adulterants had been added to it.
She said: 'It puts the brain to sleep, so you are a zombie, you don't know what you're doing, how much of it and where.
'People do just wander round in what looks like a trance until the symptoms wear off, but again that is dose dependent and a lot of people have more severe reactions to a small dose.'
On the risk of longer term brain damage, she added: 'If you're putting your brain to sleep, it wouldn't be the most unusual thing for there to be some long lasting damage when they finally come around.'