Dramatic footage of El Chapo arrest raid

Meanwhile, President carefully side-stepped questions about actor Sean Penn’s controversial meeting with the cartel boss.

Penn has admitted he feared he was being monitored as he flew to Mexico to meet Guzman, for an interview published by Rolling Stone this week. Guzman also agreed to the interview.

In a brief email exchange with The Associated Press on Monday, Penn simply stated, “I’ve got nothin’ to hide”, when asked about the government images.

The article reports that Guzman defends his work at the head of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organization.

“No, you’re reading hits”, he said.

Penn’s long and often rambling essay, widely mocked on social media, included comments from Guzman on everything from his childhood to his thoughts on the drug trade.

A six-month investigation preceded the raid on Guzman’s camp. But a Mexican security official said he is being held in a different cell. “With this action, 98 of the 122 most unsafe criminals no longer present a threat to society and we are going for all of them”.

But it is understood this process could take more than a year.

Mexico’s willingness to extradite Guzman is a sharp turnaround from the last time he was captured in 2014, when then-Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said the extradition would happen only after he finished his sentence in Mexico in “300 or 400 years”.

Officials defended the decision to put him back in the same prison, saying security was beefed up.

One of the two small planes they boarded is pictured, supposedly heading toward Guzman’s hideout in northwestern Mexico. Penn took criticism for this, and Rolling Stone came under the gun for allowing Guzman to have final approval over the story, even though he didn’t request any changes.

One photo, apparently taken from a distance, shows a man resembling Penn and a woman, identified as Del Castillo, arriving at the airport in the western city of Guadalajara on October 2.

“First of all, I want to compliment the Mexican government”, Obama said. They also wish to question the actors Sean Penn and Kate Del Castillo for information which led to his arrest, when they travelled to the jungle and interviewed the drug lord for the Rolling Stones magazine. Guzman wanted Castillo, who had played a drug trafficker in a TV series, to have a part in a film about his life.

A month before he escaped, US authorities had sought his extradition.