Family of former Venezuelan minister Raúl Baduel asks the UN to exhume the body

The lawyer representing the family of the former Venezuelan minister Raul Baduel, who died on Tuesday, asked the United Nations to process the exhumation of the body with the Government of Nicolás Maduro to find out what caused “exactly” his death.

The Venezuelan Prosecutor’s Office assures that Baduel died of cardiorespiratory arrest caused by covid-19, but in statements to the press in Washington the family lawyer, Omar Mora Tosta, again questioned that version and demanded an independent investigation.

Mora Tosta explained that on Tuesday, the same day that Baduel’s death became known, they went to the Caracas office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to request the creation of an “international commission” to investigate what happened and ask Maduro to exhume the body.

“An autopsy must be done by that international commission that we hope will be constituted shortly”Mora Tosta said.

As he assured, the body of the general was buried “on the run” in the East Caracas Cemetery without allowing relatives to be present to give it a “Christian burial” and with the cemetery “cordoned off” to avoid media surveillance. Communication.

The attorney general of Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, offered the family on Wednesday the possibility of doing a second autopsy with private doctors, although he insists that the death was due to covid-19.

“He (Saab) never imagined that we were going to ask the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS), the institutions that protect human rights in the world, to be really an independent commission, so that we would not anyone could be manipulated”Said Mora Tosta.

ALMAGRO ASKS THE UN TO EXHUME

The family of the former minister also garnered the support of the Secretary of the OAS, Luis Almagro, who also promised to transfer the request for the exhumation of the body to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and to the office of the UN in Caracas.

“It has been our commitment (…) to take that request to Michelle Bachelet and to the mission on the ground in Venezuela so that the exhumation and autopsy of General Baudel’s body be carried out to determine the cause of his death.” Almagro said in statements to the press at the agency’s headquarters.

Almagro also asked for the release of “All political prisoners”, that reach 260, according to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal.

PROTECTION MEASURES FOR THE IACHR

On the other hand, the family’s lawyer announced this Thursday that he is going to request precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an autonomous body of the OAS, to protect the 13 children of the deceased former minister.

One of his sons is Josnars Adolfo Baduel, who is imprisoned after a failed maritime incursion last year against the Maduro government.

Baduel, who was Minister of Defense under the late President Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), was considered the architect of his return to the Presidency after the coup that overthrew him for 48 hours in April 2002. He was also Minister of Defense. Defense between 2006 and 2007.

Subsequently, he spoke out against the alleged totalitarian drift and the proposal for constitutional reform of the late President Hugo Chávez, as well as his dauphin and successor, Nicolás Maduro.

He had been imprisoned since 2009 and was considered by the opposition as a “political prisoner”.

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