Convinced that it was a political crime, Prosecutor Barros asks Venezuela for criminal collaboration

He Prosecutor Héctor Barros, head of the Organized Crime and Homicide Team (ECOH) of the Prosecutor’s Officeprovided background information on the crime of Lt. (R) Venezuelan Ronald Ojedawho was kidnapped on February 21 from his apartment in Independencia.

In this regard, Barros reaffirmed the thesis he posed last night in a report by Chilevision about the crime of the former lieutenant was politically motivated and that this would have been created from Venezuela.

As in the aforementioned report, Barros indicated that “investigative lines have been discarded” and that “so far we have established that this was not a self-kidnapping, that it was not an extortionate kidnapping, this was organized by the Aragua Train with a foreign organization and in the context of organized crime.”

In that sense, Ojeda’s profile led them “to conclude that none of the first hypotheses in which the victim was involved in illicit acts or the Aragua Train had kidnapped him for the purposes of collecting a ransom, are absolutely ruled out.”

Due to this, the “only line we have left” is that of a politically motivated crime on the part of Venezuela, he added, which is why a “request for international criminal assistance was made to Venezuela, so that they can help us with the arrest of the two Venezuelan citizens who are in Venezuela.”

“I have never said that (this) is counterintelligence, what I said is a transnational crime, that was organized in Venezuela,” he concluded.

The conclusions

What made prosecutor Barros think about the political motive? According to the newspaper Third, there are several antecedents that the investigation has revealed and that led to that conclusion, such as the autopsy. Ojeda. According to experts, he was murdered hours after his capture by asphyxiation by his captors.

However, the thanatologists found signs on his body of having been tied and beaten to such an extent that the Public Ministry had to activate the Minnesota protocol for this investigation, after the discovery of signs of torture of which the former Venezuelan military man had been a victim before. of being murdered.

The hypotheses used by the Public Ministry are that Ojeda was tortured to obtain information, since they did not ask for ransom money.

Another clue is that all those involved in the kidnapping, after the murder took place, left through unauthorized steps towards Venezuela.

Reaction in Venezuela

The revelation of the report was echoed in some of the main Venezuelan media. For example, the newspaper El Nacional published: “Chile points to political crime in Ojeda case.”

Others, such as El Universal or Últimas Noticias, have not published anything about it.

In television media, neither VTV nor TeleSur have mentioned the statements of prosecutor Barros.

Subsequently, the Attorney General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, issued a statement in which he informed national and international public opinion about the request for inter-institutional cooperation received from the National Prosecutor’s Office of Chile. As confirmed by Saab in the letter published on the social network for terrorism.

Prosecutor Saab assured that the Venezuelan Public Ministry is looking for those “allegedly involved” in the crime. Furthermore, along with stating that the Aragua Train has already been “dismantled,” he said that his country offers Chile all its experience in combating “organized crime groups.”