In a bizarre twist to an already heated election year in Venezuela, a veteran crossword writer has been accused of coding a plot to assassinate President Hugo Chavez's brother into a puzzle that ran on Wednesday.
Neptali Segovia, who writes crosswords for the newspaper Ultimas Noticias, voluntarily submitted to questioning by intelligence agents Friday following allegations by a television pundit, Reuters reports.
The pundit, Perez Pirela, argued that the crossword -- whose answers included "Adan" (the first name of the Venezuelan president's brother), the Spanish verb "asesinen" ("to kill") and "rafagas," a word that the New York Times reports "can refer to a burst of machine-gun fire but also a gust of wind" -- constituted a threat to the life of Adan Chavez.
Pirela compared it to coded messages that Charles de Gaulle sent to the French resistance during World War Two.
Segovia said that the crossword was "transparent" and had only cultural and educational intentions, according to Reuters.
President Hugo Chavez, who is battling cancer, has accused his political opponents of planning violence in the run-up to the South American country's October election.
In 2011, the BBC reported that Chavez "questioned whether the US has developed a secret technology to give cancer to left-wing leaders in Latin America."
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The Huffington Post | Posted: 05/12/2012 4:27 pm Updated: 05/12/2012 4:27 pm