Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Pablo Guanipa has been kidnapped in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas.
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado said this in a post on the social media X.
It says that heavily armed men wearing civilian clothes were behind it. According to Machado, they arrived in four vehicles and took Juan Pablo Guanipa away by force.
According to the opposition leader, the kidnapping took place in the Los Chorros area.
"We demand his immediate release," she writes.
Guanipa's son also reports the kidnapping.
In a video shared on social media, Ramon Guanipa said the incident took place shortly before midnight local time, according to Reuters news agency. He described it as an ambush in which his father was abducted by ten heavily armed, unidentified men.
On Sunday, Juan Pablo Guanipa's family announced in a statement, according to Reuters, that he had been released after more than eight months in prison.
He was arrested in May last year because, according to Venezuela's interior minister, he had allegedly headed a "terrorist network".
According to the AFP news agency, before his arrest he had been in hiding, and the last time he was seen in public was in January 2025, when he accompanied Machado to a demonstration against President Nicolas Maduro.
Guanipa has previously served in parliament and is a close collaborator with Maria Corina Machado, who received the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
61-year-old Juan Pablo Guanipa was released a month after authorities in the country began releasing political prisoners from the country's prisons.
This happened after Jorge Rodriguez, the president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, announced that they would release "a significant number" of prisoners as a peace gesture towards the United States, which removed Maduro from power in early January.
According to AFP, human rights groups have estimated that there are still around 700 imprisoned people waiting to be released.
The Venezuelan government has not immediately responded to inquiries about the reports of the kidnapping of Juan Pablo Guanipa.
/ritzau/
