Peru said on Monday that its fugitive former spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, was alive and that investigators were closing in on him.
"We have information that he is alive, I cannot say in what condition or where, but we are getting closer," interim Interior Minister Antonio Ketin Vidal told a news conference after rumours swirled that the man who plunged Peru into months of political crisis last year was dead or captured.
Ketin Vidal's comments came after a weekend dash to Venezuela for talks with his counterpart as the hunt for Latin America's most wanted man focused on Venezuela's countryside.
After months of flatly denying reports that Montesinos was ever in the country, Venezuelan authorities now say they are co-operating closely with Peru to try to clear up the mystery and that they will send the fugitive home if they catch him.
"Mr. Montesinos could be in Venezuela on the run from Peruvian justice," Venezuela's security vice minister, General Francisco Belisario, told a news conference earlier.
Ketin Vidal, who became a hero after catching the head of Peru's Shining Path rebel group in 1992, said Montesinos had been seen at a luxury ecotourism hotel in Cojedes state, southwest of Caracas.
Peru has offered a US$5 million bounty for Montesinos, who is wanted on a string of charges ranging from money laundering to corruption to ordering torture and death squads.
"There is more than one person who has seen him and knows about his movements inside the estate and who have said they are sure that it's Vladimiro Montesinos," the minister said.
Venezuelan authorities had been searching the Cojedes area, Ketin Vidal said. "I had a phone conversation with (Interior Minister) Luis Miquilena this morning and I asked him about the result of the operation and he told me it was negative."
The whereabouts of the former spy chief, whose extensive corruption network is still rocking Peru after toppling former President Alberto Fujimori last November, has become a potentially damaging controversy for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The Venezuelan leader and his aides have faced an almost daily barrage of questions since Miquilena admitted earlier this month there was evidence the fugitive had been in Caracas in December for plastic surgery on his face - contradicting his predecessor Jose Vicente Rangel's assertion at the time that such suggestions were "magic realism."
Miquilena also indicated that local police might have helped him escape, which angered Peruvians.
For days, Venezuela's opposition-dominated newspapers have carried reports that Montesinos, who disappeared from Peru late last year on a trail believed to have also taken him to the Galapagos islands, Costa Rica and Aruba, was being protected by influential figures close to the Chavez government.
(China Daily 04/25/2001)
