BBC : Chavez minister in spat with US

Chavez minister in spat with US

BBC News | September 24, 2006

Venezuela has accused US officials of stopping its foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, and stripping him of his travel documents after he visited the UN.

President Hugo Chavez said Mr Maduro had been questioned about his alleged role in a failed Venezuelan coup attempt in 1992, led by Mr Chavez.

Venezuela has made a formal complaint to the US authorities and to the UN secretary general about the incident.

The US authorities said there was no evidence Mr Maduro had been detained.

A spokesman for the US department for homeland security said the Venezuelan minister was asked to go through a second, routine screening and after that he could have caught his flight home but decided to stay in New York.

There appears to have been a row between security officials and Mr Maduro as he was passing his belongings through an airport metal detector, the BBC's Greg Morsbach reports from Caracas.

At a news conference in New York, the foreign minister said his ticket and passport were confiscated illegally by US officials at the security check. He said he was then verbally abused and strip-searched during a 90-minute interrogation.

This latest episode shows that even small difficulties between the two governments are likely to trigger full-blown diplomatic rows, our correspondent adds.

'Insulting'

Mr Chavez said suggestions that his minister had been involved in the 1992 coup were "absolutely false".

Mr Maduro phoned Venezuelan television station Globovision on Saturday to tell them he had been detained.

Mr Mauro said the situation had deteriorated when he informed officials that he was Venezuela' s chief diplomat.

He said he was confined to a small room and told to remove his clothes.

"They started insulting, yelling and brought a police officer... and they started threatening us," Mr Maduro added.

"Now I have no documents and cannot travel."

The country's Vice-President, Jose Vicente Rangel, said there was no doubt that the detention was connected to Mr Chavez's speech at the General Assembly on Wednesday in which he mocked US President George W Bush as "the devil."

It was an "unspeakable" attack, he said.