BOGOTA, May 16 (Reuter) Police pulled the plug on Friday on a sophisticated
telecommunications centre in the Colombian capital that drug lords used to
coordinate their illicit business activities around the globe.

``We've left Colombia's drug cartels incommunicado,'' National Police chief
Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano said of the clandestine communications office, which
operated out of a warehouse on the west side of Bogota.

Serrano, who said the centre was equipped with an estimated $10 million worth
of hightech communications equipment including a satellite telephone,
likened it to an underworld version of Colombia's staterun telephone
company, Telecom. All of the country's top drug gangs were believed to have
used it to coordinate worldwide smuggling and money laundering operations, he
said.

He said the satellite phone alone had allowed traffickers to stay in touch
with ships smuggling drugs on the high seas and the pilots of cocaineladen
aircraft.

The warehouse, from which drug barons were able to reach out and touch their
business contacts in far off places such as Asia and Africa, was owned by
Efrain Hernandez, a drug lord known as ``Don Efra'' who was gunned down in a
luxury shopping mall on the north end of the capital last year, Serrano said.

He said four people were arrested in connection with the illicit
telecommunications outfit but declined further comment.