High-profile YouTuber Spanian has filmed the heart-stopping moment he got caught up in a military raid of a drug house he had been documenting in Colombia.
Anthony Lees, known as Spanian, had been invited by drug dealers to visit the den in Medellin – a city which was known as the ‘murder capital of the world’ when the Pablo Escobar cartel was operating from the 1970s into the 1990s.
Spanian, 37, visits dangerous neighbourhoods around and overseas and shares his adventures to his 775,000 subscribers.
The footage of his most recent visit showed him standing in a crumbling apartment in front of ‘bricks of drugs’, guns and ammunition laid out on a bed.
‘So here’s, pretty much, the insides of their business,’ he said.
‘Tusi is the product we move,’ one of the alleged drug dealers said, referring to a new form of ketamine, also known as ‘pink cocaine’.
‘For us to be able to do this, we have lookouts all over the streets,’ a man, whose face was blurred, said.
Tensions became visibly heightened as the room fell silent because of an unexpected visitor outside the apartment.
‘Why are they whispering, I’m getting paranoid,’ Spanian said.
The fixer who arranged the tour of the drug house was then seen putting a finger to his lips to urge quiet.
Then a voice was heard saying the word no-one would ever want to hear in a drug den.
‘Cops.’
Several people jumped over a back wall with Spanian following close behind.
He ran across sheets of fibro roofs before making his getaway down a staircase and past bricks of drugs that the dealers had dropped along the way.
He emerged onto a graffiti-strewn alleyway, visibly shaken.
‘Cuz, that’s crazy, I’m going to turn the camera off for a minute, alright. This is no f****** joke,’ he said.
Spanian cut off the camera before he resumed the video when he was far away from danger.
‘If it wasn’t clear what happened, while we were in the middle of all that, bricks of drugs on the bed, guns on the bed, the military came,’ he said.
‘I seen a military bloke. I seen his head. He was looking at me.
‘I ducked back in the house, the lads started running, grabbing bricks of drugs, dropping them everywhere, hitting the rooves.’
Spanian feared what could have happened to him if he had been nabbed by the military.
‘I have no idea and I don’t wanna know. But, it’s probably the end of Spanian, you know what I mean?’ he said.
‘I got raided in a drug house in Colombia.’
Spanian had earlier been conversing with the drug dealers who explained how they weighed the contraband and what they used to wrap it.
They said they dealt cocaine and marijuana and offered Spanian a taste of tusi when he asked them what it was.
‘No, I’m good,’ he replied, laughing nervously.
‘It’s a mixture of different types of pills to make you happy,’ his guide told him.
‘It’s very addictive, very bad drug, (used by) a lot of young people. It was supposed to be the fancy drug used by rich people.
‘(But) now the recipe is all spread around so every (drug dealer) makes their own.’