Incident with the Venezuelan minister

The US forced to apologize

CARACAS – Diplomatic incident between Venezuela and the United States. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro said he was detained for one hour and forty minutes at New York’s JFK international airport and was deprived of travel documents. “The airport officials began to insult me, to scream, they sent a policeman and started threatening me,” the minister explained. “I demand that the American government respect the rules of international law”.

Venezuelan Vice President Josè Vicente Rangel linked the incident that occurred to his colleague to the speech he delivered last Wednesday to the UN General Assembly by President Hugo Chavez, who called US colleague George Bush “the devil”.

The United States admits the blunder and makes an official apology but deny the reason that led the police authority to detain the Venezuelan Foreign Minister. The spokesman for the US foreign ministry, Gonzalo Gallegos, admitted that “the State Department is sorry for the incident”. It does not hide the State Department that the airport security services have questioned the minister and requested confirmation of his identity but they specify that they have no evidence to be able to assert that his travel documents have been withdrawn, that he has been attacked or that he is been detained “.

September 24 2006