Venezuelan intelligence agents have released opposition leader and congress chief Juan Guaido after briefly detaining him on the way to a political rally, a congressional official has said.
A video posted on social media appears to show the moment Guaido was pulled from a car on a highway.
While it was not possible to identify the legislator in the video, his wife and Guaido’s own Twitter account said that he had been detained.
The Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment, Reuters news agency reported.
Urgente…..vean como fue el secuestro de @GuaiF Narcodictadura asesina pic.twitter.com/pUO53nVrH4
— Antonio Ledezma (@alcaldeledezma) 13 January 2019
The leader of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Guaido said on Friday he was willing to assume the Latin American country’s presidency after the opposition declared President Nicolas Maduro’s second term to be illegitimate.
The assembly was rendered powerless by Venezuela’s Supreme Court after Maduro’s ruling Socialist Party lost control of it in 2016.
“I assume the duty imposed by the Constitution and Article 333, which obliges all Venezuelans, vested with authority or not, to fight for the restitution of constitutional order,” the assembly quoted Guaido as saying in a series of posts on Twitter.
Guaido, a legislator from the hardline Popular Will opposition party, added that he would only take office with support of the armed forces.
His comments came a day after Maduro was sworn in to a second term, defying critics in the United States and Latin America who have labelled the 56-year-old an illegitimate “usurper”.
The political heir to late leftist President Hugo Chavez, Maduro has presided over an economic collapse in oil-rich Venezuela which has seen soaring hyperinflation and widespread shortages of food and medicine.
Initially elected in 2013, he was restored to office during an election last May that was widely condemned by the international community.
The ballot was called for by the majority pro-Maduro Constituent Assembly and boycotted by the opposition, many of whose best-known leaders were under house arrest or barred from running.
Turnout for the single-round vote was about 46 percent, according to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE).
Nearly 72 percent of voters now want Maduro to resign, according to a recent survey by the country’s most reliable pollster, Datanalisis.
SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies
