BOGOTA – The hunters assigned to kill a male hippopotamus that escaped from a ranch once owned by late Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar were two top executives of an auto company who received the animal’s head for their private collection.

That information emerged from a follow-up report on the hunt – to which Efe gained access Wednesday – that was prepared by Corantioquia, the government agency in the northwestern province of Antioquia that ordered the hippo killed as a health hazard to local farmers and fishermen.

The animal, nicknamed Pepe, was killed by the president and CEO of Autoelite, Federico and Christian Pfeil Schneider, respectively, who represent German auto manufacturer Porsche in Colombia and are members of the Colombian Sport Shooting Federation, or Fedetiro.

According to the report, regional and national environmental authorities, in a resolution approved June 9, ordered that the hunt be carried out by Fedetiro members, who “have experience in these types of procedures.”

The document, which did not provide details on the selection of the hunters, said Federico and Christian Pfeil Schneider were armed with long-range, high-powered rifles with the intent of causing Pepe “the least amount of suffering.”

The team of hunters consisted of the auto execs, their assistant, a taxidermist, representatives of three local environmental institutions and members of a Colombia army battalion.

The animal was killed on June 18 with four gunshots, including one each to the head and heart, after being cornered at his favorite grazing area.

The resolution said the animal’s “entrails were to be buried and the carcass transported to the private collection of Mr. Federico Pfeil Schneider,” while another hippopotamus, a baby named Hip, was to be captured and taken to a Bogota zoo.

The taxidermist cut off the animal’s legs to present them as evidence to the Environment Ministry and reserved the head for the hunters.

Corantioquia also said in the report that the army did not properly bury the animal’s entrails and therefore called on the local Neotropical Wildlife Foundation to mitigate “the negative impact of the killing of the hippopotamus.”

The slain animal, along with a female named Matilda and Hip – apparently the other hippos’ offspring – escaped more than two years ago from Hacienda Napoles, a huge ranch on the banks of the Magdalena River in west-central Colombia. Escobar collected some 1,500 exotic species at the ranch in the 1980s, including three mating pairs of hippopotamuses from Africa that later multiplied to almost 30.

Corantioquia said the hunting permit was granted after two and a half years of unsuccessful efforts to re-locate the three hippopotamuses on the loose – as well as those still at Hacienda Napoles – at several zoos in Colombia and one in Costa Rica.

The 3,000-hectare (7,400-acre) Hacienda Napoles, now a tourist destination, has hotels, 20 artificial lakes, a landing strip big enough to handle a C-130 Hercules military transport aircraft and even has a replica of the aircraft that the infamous drug lord Escobar – killed in a 1993 shootout with Colombian security forces – used to ship his first batch of cocaine out of the country.

The killing of the hippo sparked an outcry among Colombian animal protection organizations, although further controversy was averted when Colombian authorities accepted an offer by Colombian beer manufacturer Bavaria to hire African wildlife experts to capture the animals and likely return them to captivity. EFE