Tag Archives: Violence

College professor, second man sought in fatal Chicago stabbing

College professor, second man sought in fatal Chicago stabbing

By Ian Simpson

(Reuters) – A nationwide manhunt was under way for a Northwestern University professor and an employee of Britain’s Oxford University who are accused in a fatal stabbing in Chicago last week, police said on Thursday.

Wyndham Lathem, 42, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Northwestern, and Andrew Warren, 56, who works at Oxford, are both at large, but Chicago police said the authorities have some idea where they might be.

“We strongly encourage Professor Lathem and Mr. Warren to do the right thing and turn themselves into any police department,” the statement said.

Officers who responded to a call last Thursday found a 30-year-old man in central Chicago with several cuts to his body, police said. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and has not been officially identified.

The police have not given a motive for the slaying or what relationship the man may have had with Lathem and Warren.

Police have restricted Lathem’s passport and Warren’s visa, and arrest warrants were out for them. Federal officials are aiding in the case and a national alert has been sent to law enforcement agencies, it said.

Northwestern said that Lathem, a faculty member since 2007, had been placed on administrative leave and banned from the Chicago-area school.

“There is no indication of any risk to the Northwestern community from this individual at this time,” it said in a statement.

Warren is a senior treasury assistant at Somerville College, part of the Oxford University network, the college said in a statement.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson)

In violence-plagued Baltimore, weekend ceasefire offers glimmer of hope

In violence-plagued Baltimore, weekend ceasefire offers glimmer of hope

By Ian Simpson

BALTIMORE (Reuters) – After the deaths of nearly 20 of her friends and relatives, Erricka Bridgeford said she wanted to take a stand against Baltimore’s worst wave of deadly violence in a generation.

It was with that sense of urgency that the 44-year-old community mediation trainer and other activists decided to organize a grassroots “ceasefire” to stop the killings, at least for 72 hours, starting at midnight on Thursday (0400 GMT on Friday).

“We want to purposefully just have a pause and a sacred space where everybody’s intention is that nobody gets killed,” Bridgeford said.

The ceasefire has the support of gang leaders, drug dealers and others linked to the violence, she said.

The slogan selected by organizers gets straight to the point: “Nobody kill anybody.”

That immediate goal is ambitious, given the spotty response to the last Baltimore ceasefire, when two people died in May on Mother’s Day weekend, slightly above the average weekend toll.

As a consequence, there is plenty of skepticism in the city, where rioting broke out in 2015 over the death of a black man in police custody.

Even so, the organizers hope that this time Maryland’s largest city can take a first, tentative step in changing a culture of violence that has fueled one of the highest homicide rates in the United States.

So far this year, there have been 206 homicides in Baltimore, putting it on a pace to break the record of 353 in 1993.

Baltimore, along with Chicago and Detroit, is among cities that Republican President Donald Trump has mentioned in criticizing the failure of local politicians, mostly Democrats, to stop the violence.

T.J. Smith, a Baltimore police spokesman whose own brother was shot to death last month, said the department backed the ceasefire as a grassroots effort to curb violence.

He blamed the trend on repeat offenders caught up in the drug trade, gang rivalries and other disputes.

But on the streets of West Baltimore, where riots erupted after a young African-American man named Freddie Gray died from an injury in the back of a police van, retiree Todd Douglas sounded a note of skepticism, saying the killings would simply resume once the ceasefire ended.

“They’ll just wait and make up for lost time,” Douglas said.

Ceasefire organizers are planning almost 50 events -cookouts, peace walks, a basketball tournament and prayer meetings – across the largely African-American city of 615,000 people.

The Rev. Scott Slater, an Episcopal priest, will lead prayers at 10 spots where people have been killed in the past year.

“The intent is to honor the people who never make the news, except as a statistic,” Slater said by phone.

If nothing else comes from the ceasefire, such gestures were a first step in helping residents feel that they were regaining control of neighborhoods, said Cassandra Crifasi, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore Collaborative for Violence Reduction.

“Even if it ends up being only one day without a shooting, that’s going to be good for the city,” Crifasi said.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Grant McCool)

Phone calls, dismissal threats: Venezuela pressures state workers to vote

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro waves during a pro-government rally with workers of state-run oil company PDVSA, in Barcelona, Venezuela July 8, 2017. Miraflores Palace/Handout via REUTERS

By Alexandra Ulmer

CARACAS (Reuters) – State workers in Venezuela are receiving frequent phone calls, pressure from bosses and threats of dismissal to ensure they vote in favor of President Nicolas Maduro’s controversial new congress on Sunday.

The unpopular leftist Maduro is pushing ahead with the election to create a powerful new legislature despite four months of deadly anti-government protests in the oil-rich South American nation, which is reeling from food shortages, runaway inflation and violent crime.

Maduro says the 545-seat Constituent Assembly, which will have the power to dissolve all other state institutions, will overcome the “armed insurrection” to bring peace to Venezuela. His opponents say it is a puppet institution designed to cement a dictatorship.

With surveys showing that almost 70 percent of Venezuelans oppose the assembly, the government wants to avoid embarrassingly low turnout in a ballot being boycotted by the opposition.

Pressure on state employees is higher than ever, according to interviews with two dozen workers at institutions ranging from state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) to the Caracas subway, as well as text messages, internal statements, and videos seen by Reuters.

“Any manager, superintendent, and supervisor who tries to block the Constituent Assembly, who does not vote, or whose staff does not vote, must leave his job on Monday,” a PDVSA vice-president, Nelson Ferrer, said during a meeting with workers this week, according to a summary circulated within the company and seen by Reuters.

In a video of a political rally at PDVSA, an unidentified company representative wearing the red shirt often worn by members of Maduro’s Socialist Party shouted into a microphone that employees who do not vote will be fired.

“We’re not joking around here,” he says.

Workers recount a laundry list of pressures: text messages every 30 minutes, phone calls, mandatory political rallies during work, requests that each worker enlist 10 others to vote, or orders to report back to a “situation room” after voting.

While it remains difficult to estimate how many of Venezuela’s 2.8 million state workers will vote, most interviewees said a significant majority probably will, either out of allegiance or out of fear.

Some Venezuelans also said Socialist Party operatives had threatened to stop distributing subsidized food bags to those who did not vote.

“I’ve seen a stream of people crying because they don’t know what to do. There’s so much fear,” said one PDVSA employee, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals.

Venezuela’s Information Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. PDVSA did not respond to a request for comment about Ferrer’s alleged remarks or wider pressures.

TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE?

After a brief coup against him and an oil strike over a decade ago, Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez increasingly staffed state institutions with his supporters.

Cheering government employees became fixtures at marches to defend the leftist firebrand’s “21st century Socialism”. PDVSA’s headquarters are still decorated with portraits of Chavez, who died of cancer in 2013.

Critics say unqualified political appointees have sunk the OPEC nation’s oil industry and spurred a brain drain.

Under Chavez’s less charismatic successor Maduro, the bolivar currency has plummeted and dragged down salaries to a few dozen U.S. dollars a month, fomenting discontent among the rank-and-file.

But, with the country of 30 million people submerged in a fourth straight year of recession, many employees stick to their posts because of health insurance, subsidized food or lack of other jobs.

Some employees said they would vote on Sunday to avoid the fate of those fired after a government lawmaker published a list of Venezuelans who signed a petition demanding a recall referendum against Chavez.

“My mother is ill, my wife is pregnant, and if I lose my job I’ll be even worse off than I am now. I need to go vote,” said a worker at Venezuelan steelmaker Sidor.

Other workers have decided to ignore phone calls and lay low on Sunday. Some are gambling that their bosses will be lenient, while others say they have compromising information about corruption or misdeeds that could protect them from dismissals.

A handful say they are willing to risk their jobs to oppose Maduro.

“We’re tired of working and working and still not being able to save. We can’t change cars or fix up our little house, let alone take a vacation,” said the director of a public school, once comfortably in the middle class.

“We’re ready to assume the consequences of not voting.”

(Additional reporting by Mircely Guanipa in Punto Fijo, Maria Ramirez in Puerto Ordaz, Anggy Polanco in San Crsitobal, and Deisy Buitrago and Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Hamburg attacker was known to security forces as Islamist: minister

Security forces and ambulances are seen after a knife attack in a supermarket in Hamburg, Germany, July 28, 2017. REUTERS/Morris Mac Matzen

HAMBURG (Reuters) – The migrant who killed one person and injured six others in a knife attack in a Hamburg supermarket on Friday was an Islamist known to German security forces, who say they believed he posed no immediate threat, the city-state’s interior minister said on Saturday.

A possible security lapse in a second deadly militant attack in less than a year, and two months before the general election, would be highly embarrassing for German intelligence, especially since security is a main theme in the Sept. 24 vote.

A Tunisian failed asylum seeker killed 12 people by driving a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin in December, slipping through the net after intelligence officers who had monitored him reached the conclusion he was no threat.

Hamburg Interior Minister Andy Grote told a news conference on Saturday that Friday’s 26-year-old attacker was registered in intelligence systems as an Islamist but not as a jihadist, as there was no evidence to link him to an imminent attack.

He also said the attacker, a Palestinian asylum seeker who could not be deported as he lacked identification documents, was psychologically unstable.

The Palestinian mission in Berlin had agreed to issue him with documents and he had agreed to leave Germany once these were ready, a process that takes a few months.

“What we can say of the motive of the attacker at the moment is that on the one side there are indications that he acted based on religious Islamist motives, and on the other hand there are indications of psychological instability,” Grote said.

“The attacker was known to security forces. There was information that he had been radicalized,” he said.

“As far as we know … there were no grounds to assess him as an immediate danger. He was a suspected Islamist and was recorded as such in the appropriate systems, not as a jihadist but as an Islamist.”

Prosecutors said the attacker pulled a 20-centimetre knife from a shelf at the supermarket and stabbed three people inside and four outside before passers-by threw chairs and other objects at him, allowing police to arrest him.

A 50-year-old man died of his injuries. None of the other six people injured in the attack is in a life-threatening condition.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is seeking a fourth term in office in September. Her decision in 2015 to open Germany’s doors to more than one million migrants has sparked a debate about the need to spend more on policing and security.

Tunisian asylum seeker Anis Amri, who could not be deported because he lacked identification documents, carried out his attack at a Christmas market in Berlin in December after security agencies stopped monitoring him because they could not prove suspicions that he was planning to purchase weapons.

(Reporting by Frank Witte in Hamburg; Writing by Joseph Nasr in Berlin; Editing by Andrew Bolton)

One dead in knife attack in Hamburg supermarket, motive unclear

Security forces are seen after a knife attack in a supermarket in Hamburg, Germany, July 28, 2017. REUTERS/Morris Mac Matzen

BERLIN (Reuters) – One person was killed in an attack by a lone knifeman in a supermarket in the northern German city of Hamburg on Friday, and four more were injured when the man fled the scene, police said.

The police said the man had suddenly started attacking customers in the shop, with no immediate indication of any political or religious motive. Officers detained him near the site.

“We have no clear information as to the motive or the number of wounded,” Hamburg police said in a tweet. “It was definitely a lone attacker.” They said initial reports about a possible robbery had not been substantiated.

Police said passersby tackled the man after he fled the scene, injuring him slightly, before plain clothes police officers could take him into custody.

Police have been on high alert in Germany since a spate of attacks on civilians last year, including a December attack on a Berlin Christmas market, when a hijacked truck plougher into the crowds, killing 12 and injuring many more.

Security has been a campaign issue ahead of Sept. 24 parliamentary elections, in which Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to win a fourth term in office.

Newspaper Bild showed a picture of the alleged Hamburg attacker sitting in the back of a police car, his face concealed with a bloodied shroud.

A video on its website showed a helicopter landed outside the supermarket with armed police in body armor patrolling the neighborhood.

(Reporting By Thomas Escritt and Andrea Shalal; Editing by Michelle Martin and Toby Davis)

Israel bans men under 50 from disputed Jerusalem holy site on Friday

Palestinians react as a stun grenade explodes in a street at Jerusalem's Old city outside the compound known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, after Israel removed all security measures it had installed at the compound. REUTERS/Amir Cohen

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel sent extra police into Jerusalem on Friday and said men under the age of 50 would be banned from the Old City’s Al-Aqsa mosque for the day in anticipation of more mass protests.

Tensions have been high at the compound for two weeks, often erupting into clashes, after two Israeli police officers were killed there, prompting Israel to install metal detectors at the entrance to the site and a subsequent Muslim boycott.

Under immense diplomatic pressure Israel removed the metal detectors on Thursday, a move welcomed by the Arab world, but violence quickly returned when thousands of Muslim worshippers surged into the mosque.

Before Israel removed the new security apparatus, Palestinian factions had called for a “day of rage” on Friday.

“Security assessments were made and there are indications that disturbances and demonstrations will take place today,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

“Extra police and border police are in and around the Old City and will respond to any disturbances.”

He said women of all ages will be allowed into the site, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary.

Israel captured East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the holy compound, in the 1967 Middle East war. It annexed the area in a move that has never been recognised internationally.

Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest shrine, sits on a tree-lined marble plateau in the heart of the Old City. It is also the holiest place in Judaism – the venue of two ancient temples, the last destroyed by the Romans. Jews pray under heavy security at the Western Wall at the foot of the elevated plaza.

The dispute, like many in the Holy Land, is about more than security devices, taking in issues of sovereignty, religious freedom, occupation and Palestinian nationalism.

(Reporting by Ari Rabinovitch; Editing by Louise Ireland)

In New York, Trump to use gang violence to press for deportations

A makeshift memorial stands outside a park, where bodies of four men were found on April 13, in Central Islip, New York, U.S., April 28, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

By Roberta Rampton and Mica Rosenberg

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will travel on Friday to a New York community shocked by a recent spate of graphic gang murders to highlight his efforts to stop illegal immigration and boost deportations.

Trump’s trip to Long Island gives the president an opportunity to showcase some progress on his agenda even as other legislative efforts flounder – and some respite from the chaos of a nasty power struggle among his senior staff that blew up on Thursday.

On Friday, Trump will highlight his administration’s push to deport members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, better known as MS-13, the existence of which his White House blames on lax enforcement of illegal immigration from Central America.

“It’s going to be a very forceful message about just how menacing this threat is, and just how much pain is inflicted on American communities,” a senior administration official told reporters ahead of the trip.

Trump’s visit comes as his Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to El Salvador to highlight progress on the gang crack-down.

The gang took root in Los Angeles in the 1980s in neighborhoods populated with immigrants from El Salvador who had fled civil war. The Justice Department has said MS-13 now has more than 10,000 members across the United States.

On Long Island – not far from the New York City borough of Queens, where Trump grew up – MS-13 was behind the murders of two teenage girls in a suburban neighborhood last September, and four young men in a park in April.

There have been 17 murders on Long Island tied to the gang since January 2016, the Suffolk County Police Department has said.

Under Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted the gang, deporting more than 2,700 criminal gang members in fiscal 2017, up from 2,057 in the whole of the previous fiscal year, the White House has said.

“We are throwing MS-13 the hell out of here so fast,” Trump said earlier this week at a rally in Ohio.

Trump made concerns about illegal immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. One of his first actions in office was to scrap Obama-era guidelines that prioritized convicted criminals for deportations.

His administration is now taking a harder line on Central American youth who have crossed the border illegally without guardians – a group that law enforcement has said has been targeted for recruitment by MS-13.

Immigration agents plan to target teenagers who are suspected gang members, even if they are not charged with any crime, according to a memo seen by Reuters.

But civil rights groups say police and immigration agents have unfairly targeted some teenagers.

“We received complaints in recent weeks from terrified parents on Long Island that teens have already been detained on the thinnest of rationales, such as wearing a basketball jersey,” said Sebastian Krueger from the New York Civil Liberties Union.

There have been at least two lawsuits filed by people claiming they were mistakenly included in gang databases and then targeted for deportation, said Paromita Shah, from the National Immigration Project at the National Lawyers Guild.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Amid ceasefire, rescuers clear unexploded bombs in Syria’s Deraa

A man prepares fuel for sale near damaged buildings in the rebel-held area in Deraa, Syria July 27, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa al-Faqir

By Sarah Dadouch

BEIRUT (Reuters) – With relative calm in southwest Syria since a ceasefire was reached in early July, civil defense services in rebel-held Deraa have shifted focus to clearing unexploded cluster bombs left by air strikes.

Men in light blue vests set up yellow tape around any of the small, silver winged cylinders found, alongside red signs marked with skeleton symbols reading, “Danger! Unexploded ammunition!”

A specialist civil defense team, trained last year in Jordan to clear mines, has dealt with about 100 cluster bombs in Deraa and nearby villages this week alone, a team member said.

After the tape and signs are set up, rescue service members pile bags of dirt around the cluster bomb and place their own blue-and-white explosive cylinder inside, a red wire trailing from it.

The team, in protective gear, hide behind mounds of soil or buildings. One man holding a trigger attached to the red wire warns his colleagues by radio. Then a shower of dirt and rubble erupts, leaving one fewer unexploded bomb on Deraa’s streets.

“We faced a lot of difficulties from air strikes and bombs in open areas,” Hasan Fashtaki, a member of the unexploded ordnance team, told Reuters by phone. “But now because of the ceasefire and calm in the area, we’re working freely,” he added.

Deraa is located in a “de-escalation zone” agreed by the United States, Russia and Jordan as part of Washington’s first peacemaking effort in Syria under President Donald Trump after six years of civil war.

It has protected Deraa and surrounding areas from new bombardment, allowing the civil defense to focus on unexploded bombs, according to Fashtaki.

The team spent 20 days in Jordan in October training and learning to de-mine areas. Bombs have been concentrated in areas that suffered heaviest bombardment including front lines and the southwestern village of Horan, Fashtaki said.

He did not know how many more unexploded bombs there were in the area or how long it will take to clear them.

“It could be that in two or three or four months time, we still would not have finished our work.”

(Reporting by Sarah Dadouch; editing by Mark Heinrich)

El Salvador prosecutors order nearly 600 arrests to stem crime spree

El Salvador's Attorney General Douglas Melendez in San Salvador, El Salvador, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Jose Cabezas

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) – Prosecutors in El Salvador ordered the arrests of some 593 people nationwide on suspicion of crimes like homicide and extortion, an action that appeared to be a major strike against gangs that have turned the Central American country into one of the deadliest in the world.

Attorney General Douglas Melendez said in a statement on Wednesday that all the detention orders were based on investigations. Other charges filed against the suspects included crimes such as terrorism, fraud, rape, kidnapping and drug possession.

So far, 337 suspected gang members had been arrested, police chief Howard Cotto said in a news conference, and efforts are ongoing to arrest the remaining suspects.

State security forces in Central America and Mexico are often accused of arbitrary detentions by human rights groups.

Violence has surged in El Salvador since a 2012 truce between the Barrio 18 gang and its rival Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, began to unravel in 2014.

The majority of those arrested so far were from MS-13 and suspected of committing crimes against the police, Cotto said.

Violent crime in El Salvador and other countries in the region is one of the main reasons why people seek to emigrate, often moving northward through Mexico to the United States.

(Reporting by Nelson Renteria; editing by Grant McCool and G Crosse)

U.S. sanctions Venezuelan officials, one killed in anti-Maduro strike

Demonstrators use a tire on fire to block a street at a rally during a strike called to protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela July 26, 2017. REUTERS/Andres Martinez Casares

By Matt Spetalnick and Alexandra Ulmer

WASHINGTON/CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) – The Trump administration imposed sanctions on 13 senior Venezuelan officials as the country’s opposition launched a two-day strike on Wednesday, heaping pressure on unpopular President Nicolas Maduro to scrap plans for a controversial new congress.

With clashes breaking out in some areas, a 30-year-old man was killed during a protest in the mountainous state of Merida, authorities said.

Venezuela’s long-time ideological foe the United States opted to sanction the country’s army and police chiefs, the national director of elections, and a vice president of the state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) for alleged corruption and rights abuses.

U.S. President Donald Trump spared Venezuela for now from broader sanctions against its vital oil industry, but such actions were still under consideration.

U.S. officials said the individual sanctions aimed to show Maduro that Washington would make good on a threat of “strong and swift economic actions” if he goes ahead with a vote on Sunday that critics have said would cement dictatorship in the OPEC country.

The leftist leader was also feeling the heat at home, where protesters backing the 48-hour national strike blocked roads with makeshift barricades and many stores remained shut for the day.

“It’s the only way to show we are not with Maduro. They are few, but they have the weapons and the money,” said decorator Cletsi Xavier, 45, helping block the entrance to a freeway in upscale east Caracas with rope and iron metal sheets.

The opposition estimated that some 92 percent of businesses and workers adhered to the strike, although it offered no evidence for the figure. Overall, fewer people appeared to be heeding the shutdown than the millions who participated in a 24-hour strike last week when five people died in clashes.

State enterprises, including PDVSA [PDVSA.UL], stayed open and some working-class neighborhoods buzzed with activity. But hooded youths clashed with soldiers firing tear gas in various places including Caracas.

In western Merida state, Rafael Vergara was shot dead when troops and armed civilians confronted protesters, local opposition lawmaker Lawrence Castro told Reuters.

Local rights group Penal Forum said 50 people had been arrested and opposition lawmakers said at least 4 protesters had been shot.

A demonstrator wears a Venezuelan flag during a strike called to protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela July 26, 2017. REUTERS/Marco Bello

A demonstrator wears a Venezuelan flag during a strike called to protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Caracas, Venezuela July 26, 2017. REUTERS/Marco Bello

‘IMPERIALIST SANCTIONS’

Maduro has vowed to push ahead with Sunday’s vote for a Constituent Assembly, which will have power to rewrite the constitution and override the current opposition-led legislature.

The successor to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez says it will bring peace to Venezuela after four months of anti-government protests in which more than 100 people have been killed.

One of the U.S. officials warned the sanctions were just an initial round and the administration was readying tougher measures. The most serious option is financial sanctions that would halt dollar payments for the country’s oil or a total ban on oil imports to the United States, a top cash-paying client.

But policy makers continue to weigh the potential risks of such sanctions, which include inflicting further suffering on Venezuelans and raising U.S. domestic gasoline prices.

Even some of Maduro’s opponents have cautioned that he could rally his supporters under a nationalist banner if the United States goes too far on sanctions as Venezuelans endure a brutal economic crisis with shortages of food and medicine.

At a campaign-style rally for Sunday’s vote, broadcast on state TV late on Wednesday, a defiant Maduro presented some of those sanctioned with replicas of a sword belonging to Latin American independence hero Simon Bolivar.

“Congratulations for these imperialist sanctions,” he said, before handing out the symbolic swords. “What makes the imperialists of the United States think they are the world government?”

Among those sanctioned were national elections director Tibisay Lucena, PDVSA finance vice president Simon Zerpa, former PDVSA executive Erik Malpica, and prominent former minister Iris Varela.

Varela tweeted a picture of herself grinning and extending a middle finger toward the camera with a message that read: “This is my response to the gringos, like Chavez told them, ‘Go to hell, you piece of shit Yankees.'”

Elections boss Lucena is scorned by opposition activists, who have said that she has delayed regional elections and blocked a recall referendum against Maduro at the behest of an autocratic government. The opposition has also long accused PDVSA of being a nest of corruption.

A demonstrator gestures while clashing with riot security force at a rally during a strike called to protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela July 26, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

A demonstrator gestures while clashing with riot security force at a rally during a strike called to protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Caracas, Venezuela July 26, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins

‘BAD ACTORS’

The U.S. officials, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the individuals targeted for sanctions were accused of supporting Maduro’s crackdown, harming democratic institutions or victimizing Venezuelans through corruption, and that additional “bad actors” could be sanctioned later.

Punitive measures include freezing U.S. assets, banning travel to the United States and prohibiting Americans from doing business with them.

Sanctions were imposed on the chief judge and seven other members of Venezuela’s pro-Maduro Supreme Court in May in response to their decision to annul the opposition-led Congress earlier this year.

That followed similar U.S. sanctions in February against Venezuela’s influential Vice President Tareck El Aissami for alleged links to drug trafficking.

Assets in the United States and elsewhere tied to El Aissami and an alleged associate and frozen by U.S. order now total hundreds of millions of dollars, far more than was expected, one of the U.S. officials told Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne, Corina Pons, Andreina Aponte, Anggy Polanco, Girish Gupta, and Fabian Cambero in Caracas, Francisco Aguilar in Barinas, Maria Ramirez in Puerto Ordaz, Mircely Guanipa in Punto Fijo, Isaac Urrutia in Maracaibo, Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer and Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne, Tom Brown, Toni Reinhold)