Caracas Daily Journal (Jeremy Morgan): Interior and Justice Minister Ramon Rodriguez Chacin said 4,500 police officers would be assigned "in a little time" to Plan Ruta Segura, the government's campaign to cut down violent crime on public transport. Rodriguez Chacin presented the balance sheet for the first half of this year, asserting that it was not true that the number of murders in Caracas exceeded 36 a week, the Globovision web site reported him having said so on Monday. He attributed figures higher than his own to "hidden interests."
During the first six months of this year, he continued, 829 people for whom arrest warrants had been issued were detained, and 2,891 individuals were caught red-handed committing crimes
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Rodriguez Chacin was not reported to have gone into details of what sort of crimes those suspects were found to be carrying out when they were captured. However, he said that during the first half throughout the country, 13,257 people had been caught committing crimes, 3,292 stolen vehicles were recovered, along with 2,329 firearms. The minister claimed the crime figures were coming down every day, and Venezuela was becoming one of the countries with fewer crimes.
Marcos Chavez, head of the scientific and investigative police, Cicpc, said the force had identified 86 criminal gangs operating in Caracas. Of these, 70 percent had been disbanded, and 60 percent of their members were in custody, he added.
In El Valle, South Caracas, four officers from the Metropolitan Police (PM) tried to intervene in what was later described as a "confrontation between gangs," one of them nicknamed Los Mujicas. Shooting continued, and one of the officers, named as Moises Domingo Rodriíguez Alvarez, 22, was shot and mortally wounded in the early hours of Sunday morning. He died in the operating theater of a hospital and was the 14th PM officer to be killed in the line of duty this year. A member of Los Mujicas was also killed.
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