Venezuelan official: CIA killed judge
Venezuela’s top prosecutor has accused the US Central Intelligence Agency of planning the assassination last year of a judge investigating sensitive political cases.
“The CIA is involved, it advised extensively, with all of its experience, on how to carry out this terrorist act,” the killing of Danilo Anderson in a car bombing on 18 November 2004, chief prosecutor Isaias Rodriguez said on Friday.
Rodriguez said the crime had been carried out by an international crime ring that was tasked with assassinating Rodriguez himself, as well as President Hugo Chavez, an elected leftist and outspoken critic of US President George Bush.
And Rodriguez alleged that CIA agents took part in meetings in Miami, Panama and Maracaibo, Venezuela, where, he said, the Anderson assassination plot was hatched.
Anderson was a controversial judge in charge of investigating about 400 people who signed or endorsed a decree by a de facto government that replaced Chavez when he was briefly ousted for under two days in April 2002.
Chavez has accused repeatedly the United States of plotting to kill him.