Caracas.- Police said Monday that the body of a missing priest has been found in this capital, hours after a top cleric reported his “mysterious” disappearance.
Jorge Piñango, the assistant secretary of the Venezuelan Bishops Conference (CEV), had gone missing over the weekend.
The assistant director of the police scientific investigation unit, Vicente Alamo, told journalists at the hotel where the body was found in the city’s Sabana Grande area, a populous business district, that the cause of death had not been determined and the body had no external wounds.
“We have to wait for the results of the autopsy. The (victim) shows signs of having been dead for 48 hours,” Alamo added, without confirming press reports that Piñango was found naked next to a box of medicines.
According to the hotel register, Piñango checked in shortly before daybreak on Saturday with a person who registered using an identity document identifying him at Antonio Rodriguez.
Hotel receptionist Maigualida Zapata told journalists that Rodriguez left the room at nightfall on Saturday, but the body was not found until cleaning staff entered the room on Monday.
The private television network Globovision reported that the number of the identity document presented by Rodriguez did not coincide with his name in official files.
Earlier Monday, a top Venezuelan cleric – one who has clashed repeatedly with the leftist government – said Piñango had “mysteriously” disappeared.
Porras, whose tenure as head of the Bishops Conference earlier this decade was marked by steady and occasionally harsh confrontation with the Chavez government, said that the priest left the home of family members around midnight Friday.
“He was returning to the headquarters of the Conference, but from that moment there has been no further news of him,” Porras said.
In the midst of widespread kidnappings, murders and other criminal acts that take the lives of an average of 30 people a day in Venezuela, thousands of young people protested on Saturday against citizens’ lack of security.
