( Spanish) – Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney general, said in an interview with on Wednesday that the Venezuelan opposition falsified the voting records found on the RESULTADOSCONVZLA.COM website and that it did not hand over the records in its possession to the alleged expert opinion carried out by the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) to validate the election results.
“There are records of people who did not vote, records of deceased people voting, records of people who voted for one candidate and then appear for another. The most unusual thing is that many people went to the QR code and some little figures or the address of a restaurant appeared,” he said, without offering proof, in an interview with Fernando del Rincón.
He added that the summons for the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, were in response to the investigation into the publication of the RESULTADOSCONVZLA.COM website. The attorney general had previously said that the website “has usurped the quality and competence that only corresponds to the Venezuelan Electoral Power.”
“(It is) an apocryphal, false page. And he (González Urrutia) publishes it, spreads it on his networks,” he said.
Pressed by ‘s Fernando del Rincón on why the government and electoral authorities have not shown the minutes, Saab said that the TSJ carried out a three-day expert appraisal in which the government “handed over its minutes,” but the opposition did not.
“The ruling party handed over its minutes, I saw when they handed them over. The Democratic Unitary Platform (the party for which González was a candidate) said that it did not have minutes. They did not bring minutes, they said that the minutes are held by Súmate, a private company. (…) In Venezuela, the electoral power is neither Súmate nor the website: it is the Judicial Power that ruled in favor of the electoral authority and the Electoral Power, which gave results that proclaimed Nicolás Maduro as president,” he added.
On August 22, the Supreme Court, which is controlled by Chavismo, validated the announcement made by the National Electoral Council that gave President Nicolás Maduro victory in the July 28 presidential elections without detailing the results of its investigation.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) has not published the detailed results by electoral college and voting table that support the announcement of President Nicolás Maduro’s victory.
The prosecutor made statements about the actions of the opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, after the election results were known. He claimed to know Gonzáles Urrutia’s decision to leave Venezuela first hand and assured that from the first moment he knew he was a “losing candidate.”
“After the results were known, which I want you to know in real time, at noon, a few hours after they had retracted their decision not to recognize the results given by the CNE, Mr. Edmundo González Urrutia went to the Dutch Embassy, and later to the Embassy of the Netherlands.”
Venezuela’s Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) has issued three subpoenas for opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia to appear in connection with the investigation into the publication of the RESULTADOSCONVZLA.COM website, which the opposition claims contained copies of the minutes its witnesses collected at voting centers and which, according to Venezuela’s Attorney General, William Tarek Saab, “has usurped the quality and competence that only corresponds to the Venezuelan Electoral Power.”
“He sent his lawyer, his legal representative, to speak to me directly. He gave me a communication (…) in which he gave the reasons why he did not appear at three previous summons that were to discuss an ongoing investigation,” said Saab.
He added that “he signed it with his own handwriting, with his ID card, and he did not declare himself president-elect for anything because he knew he had lost.”
Gonzalez’s departure from Venezuela comes five days after a court ordered his arrest on charges related to the publication of election results on a website. Gonzalez has repeatedly denied the charges against him.
According to the opposition candidate’s lawyer, Edmundo González’s decision to go to Spain was due to “urgent decisions” to preserve his life and freedom.
After being presented with a long list of organizations that claim that human rights are not respected in Venezuela, the prosecutor acknowledged himself as a leader of human rights and stated that these organizations “have double standards.”
According to the Venezuelan government’s own figures, at least 2,400 people have been arrested, including several minors, and non-governmental organisations have reported 24 people dead in the context of the political crisis that the country is experiencing following the presidential elections on 28 July.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression (RELE) condemned what they described as “practices of institutional violence” that have occurred in Venezuela.
According to Saab, the deaths that occurred in this context have a direct perpetrator: “They were killed by the extreme right.” He added that “there is not a single complaint that links any of those killed to any security body of the Venezuelan State, neither to the PNB nor to the Sebin nor to the Police.”
“The majority of people detained did not exercise their right to vote, they are not registered with the CNE and they were recruited because we have a large number of testimonies.”
The Attorney General also said that these people were paid to go out and burn public property.
–With information from Marlon Sorto, Ivonne Valdés and Verónica Calderón.
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