AFP/Miami

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro personally ordered opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez’s arrest to take him out of the “political game,” said a former prosecutor who has fled the country.
Speaking from Miami, Franklin Nieves, who worked on Lopez’s case, said an army general made him issue an arrest warrant for the jailed opposition leader under orders from the socialist president.
“He told me the instructions he had from President Nicolas Maduro... were to request four arrest warrants. He showed me a piece of paper where the first (name) was Leopoldo Lopez,” Nieves told CNN Espanol in an interview.
Nieves posted a video to YouTube late Friday saying he had fled Venezuela with his family after being threatened with firing or jail if he did not stand by what he called the “false evidence” used to convict Lopez of inciting violence.
After the video was posted, the attorney general fired Nieves for going absent without leave.
Lopez, the 44-year-old Harvard-educated leader of the Popular Will party, was sentenced in September to 14 years in prison on charges of inciting anti-government protests last year that left 43 people dead.
The US, the European Union and the United Nations have all condemned Lopez’s conviction, which his lawyers have appealed.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez lashed out at the US as “insolent” after US state department spokesman John Kirby said Nieves’s allegations, if true, showed a lack of judicial independence and respect for due process in Venezuela.
“It’s vulgar how the US blackmails, threatens and buys prosecutors in Latin America to block justice and satisfy their own interests,” Rodriguez wrote on Twitter.
The case comes as Venezuela heads toward key legislative elections on December 6, which Maduro’s political movement risks losing for the first time since his late mentor Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999.