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Caracas (AFP) – Venezuela issued an arrest warrant against journalist Carla Angola, who lives in Miami and criticizes the government of President Nicolás Maduro, for “apology for the assassination,” Attorney General Tarek William Saab reported Thursday.
“The prosecutor’s office requested the arrest warrant against this lady for the alleged commission of the crime of apology in relation to the crime of assassination,” said Saab. “He instigated the perpetration of an assassination against the President of the Republic.”
The case against Angola, 46, was opened after the broadcast on Monday, August 1, of the opinion program that he hosts on the EVTV television station, with programming aimed at Venezuelan migration in the United States.
“The United States sends a drone and they disappear this man,” Angola said, referring to the death of Egyptian al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on Saturday in a US strike in Kabul, Afghanistan.
“And what is it that the Venezuelan says on social networks? Why don’t they do the same with Maduro? And here we are obviously not making an apology for his murder, but it is a valid question,” the journalist told an interviewee.
“She says it like it’s a joke,” criticized Saab. “That is plain and simple an apology for the crime of assassination.”
Angola, on EVTV, reacted to the arrest warrant by calling it an “exercise of state terrorism by the Maduro regime and its prosecutor.”
Before migrating to the United States, the journalist hosted another opinion program on the Globovisión news channel, a trench of the government opposition until its sale in 2013 to a businessman close to Chavismo. She resigned at that time along with other communicators.
Venezuela is in the basement of international press freedom indexes, in an environment of self-censorship to avoid administrative sanctions that could lead to the closure of private media.
RCTV, an emblematic television station and critic of Chavismo, closed in 2007 after being denied the extension of its concession.
The group that owns Últimas Noticias, the newspaper with the largest circulation, was also sold in 2013 and the centennial newspaper El Universal a year later. They softened their editorial line after changing owners.
Prosecutor Saab also announced an investigation against Angola’s husband for a dispute over the ownership of a property in Caracas.
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