BOLIVIA’S VICE-PRESIDENT claimed yesterday that security forces thwarted an assassination plot with the shooting dead of three suspected mercenaries, one of them an Irishman, in the city of Santa Cruz.
Alvaro Garcia Linera, Bolivia’s vice-president, said in a press conference in La Paz the group was “a band of terrorist mercenaries, Croatians, Irish and Bolivians” that intended to destabilise the country’s left-wing government.
The interior minister said a list of assassination targets was headed by Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president. Neither man gave any reason as to why they thought one of the suspects was Irish.
But as the news spread across South America of Irish involvement in a plot to assassinate the president of Bolivia, a police spokesman in the capital La Paz contacted by The Irish Times said the three dead men included two Hungarians and one Bolivian.
The men were what police described as a group of mercenaries who were involved in a shoot-out with officers in a hotel in Santa Cruz in the early hours of yesterday morning.
Three suspects were killed and a Hungarian and a Bolivian arrested, said the police spokesman.
A spokesman at the Department of Foreign Affairs said they had seen local media reports and were trying to check them out but had no firm information as yet.