US officials may face new scandal after Venezuela shooting
Conflicting reports about the incident involving two US
embassy staff in Venezuela may finally lay bare a scandal as the two officials
were reportedly shot after a brawl at a strip club, reports Presstv.
The Venezuelan police and the US State Department confirmed
the shooting, which took place early Tuesday, but the details of the incident
are still unclear with different reports over whether it took place outside or
inside the Antonella 2012 nightclub.
State Department official Patrick Ventrell said that the
incident occurred in "some sort of social spot or somewhere outside of the
embassy grounds."
"I am not sure if it was a restaurant, or a nightclub,
or what the actual establishment was, but that is why we are in touch with
embassy personnel," he added.
A Venezuelan police official, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to reporters, identified one
of the victims as military attaché Roberto Ezequiel Rosas. She did not provide
details about the other man.
An Associated Press reporter who had gone to the scene said
he had not seen any obvious signs of a shooting outside the place. The AP
identified the place as a strip club.
Uri Friedman wrote in the website of Foreign Policy that “a
year after the Secret Service prostitution scandal in Colombia, a new scandal
involving US officials may be brewing in Venezuela.”
He was referring to a scandal early last year when a dozen
US Secret Service members who were on a mission before President Barack Obama’s
visit to the Colombian city of Cartagena were accused of misconduct for
bringing women, some of them prostitutes, to their hotel rooms.
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