Diego Montoya fought his way to the top of Colombia's bloody drug trafficking industry only to meet a humiliating end: in a pre-dawn raid, troops found him hiding in bushes clad only in a T-shirt and underwear.

When the one of world's most-wanted drug traffickers came face-to-face Monday with the people who had hunted him for so many years, authorities say his only words were: "I lost."

It was a hard fall for the man called the "Lord of War" who reputedly ran Colombia's most powerful remaining cocaine cartel, compared with the legendary Pablo Escobar and sitting alongside Osama bin Laden on the FBI's most wanted list.

Montoya is accused of leading the Norte del Valle cartel, considered Colombia's most dangerous drug trafficking organization, and of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and Europe.

He was arrested early Monday by an elite army unit near a farm where his mother and uncle were staying in Colombia's Valle del Cauca province. He offered troops US$5 million (€3.6 million) — the same amount as the U.S. bounty on his head — to let him go, said Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, who traveled with Montoya on a plane back to Bogota.

"Drug traffickers take note: This is the future that awaits you," Santos told a news conference before Montoya limped out of an air force plane wearing plastic handcuffs and escorted by five commandos to be paraded before waiting journalists.

With his hair shorn and a close-cropped beard, flitting between grimaces and smiles, Montoya refused to answer any questions before he was rushed away to the prosecutor's office for interrogation.

Santos said Montoya and his army of killers were responsible for 1,500 killings in his career.

Officials said Montoya put up no resistance during his arrest. But local media reported that hours after his capture, soldiers came under fire from members of his gang.

Santos said the government would begin proceedings to extradite him which would take a maximum of two months.

What distinguished Montoya in the cutthroat world of drug-trafficking was his violence and intelligence.

"He had ability, he rose through the ranks and became one of the last men standing after the rest fell," said Hank Twehues, a special agent in the Miami, Florida office of the FBI who has been following the Norte del Valle cartel. "We've always considered him one of the more violent traffickers in a very violent trafficking organization."

The government has been closing in on the cartel since last year, when soldiers killed eight members of a private militia believed to be protecting Montoya. But a wide network of cartel informants had frustrated the search for the alleged drug boss himself.

Further complicating efforts to capture him was that some local army officers were allegedly on his payroll. Around a dozen army and navy officers are in jail on charges of collaborating with the cartel.

Better known as "Don Diego," Montoya is said to be in a bitter turf war with his cartel's other leader, Wilber Varela, who goes by the nickname "Jabon," or "Soap," and is reported to be living in Venezuela. Hundreds have died in fighting between their rival armed bands along Colombia's Pacific coast.

A U.S. indictment unsealed in 2004 against Montoya and Varela said that over the past 14 years, their cartel had exported more than 1.2 million pounds — 600 tons — of cocaine worth more than US$10 billion (€7.25 billion) from Colombia to Mexico and ultimately to the United States for resale.

Colombia's government has made major gains against the cartel this year.

Montoya's brother, Eugenio Montoya, was captured in January. Former cartel leader Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamante, known as "Rasguno" or "Scratchy," was extradited to the United States in July after pledging to cooperate with U.S. authorities.

The gang's alleged money-laundering chief, Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, known as "Chupeta" or "Lollipop," was arrested last month in Brazil.

The Norte del Valle cartel rose in the mid-1990s from the ashes of the once dominant Medellin and Cali gangs, paying for drugs and protection from both far-right paramilitaries and leftist rebels. The latter two forces have squeezed the drug gangs out of much of Colombia's countryside and finance their armed struggle by selling drugs to the new criminal groups.

The United States is funneling more than US$700 million (€507 million) a year to Colombia in anti-narcotics and military aid.

Since taking office in 2002, President Alvaro Uribe, a key U.S. ally in Latin America, has approved the extradition of more than 540 Colombians to the United States, the majority on drug-trafficking charges.