Venezuela to try lawmakers for failed drone attack

CARACAS/BOGOTA — Venezuela’s all-powerful constituent assembly said it would try opposition lawmakers Wednesday over a failed attack on President Nicolas Maduro, who also accused exiled opposition leader Julio Borges.

This as a former Venezuelan municipal police chief and anti-government activist says he helped organize an operation to launch armed drones over a military rally on Saturday that Maduro has called an assassination attempt.

Assembly chief Diosdado Cabello called the session to strip the lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity so they could face trial for the alleged and failed bid to kill the president.

“When justice comes, it hits hard,” Cabello said.

In a television and radio address, Maduro simultaneously accused opposition legislator Juan Requesens and Borges, a former parliamentary speaker currently in exile who is a top opposition figure, of having plotted a drone “assassination” attempt on the Socialist leader over the weekend.

Requesens’s party, Primero Justicia (Justice First), said he and his sister Rafaela were “arrested and hit” in a sweep by a group of 14 men from the SEBIN national intelligence service unit.

In an interview, Salvatore Lucchese, a Venezuelan activist who was previously imprisoned for his role in past protests, told Reuters he orchestrated the attack with a loose association of anti-Maduro militants known generally in Venezuela as the “resistance.”

The “resistance” referred to by Lucchese is a diffuse collection of street activists, student organizers and former military officers. It has little formal structure, but is known in the country mostly for organizing protests in recent years in which demonstrators have clashed with police and soldiers.

Reuters could not independently verify Lucchese’s claims about the attack, in which drones flew over the rally in central Caracas.