SPAIN'S foreign affairs ministry has called for an 'urgent' meeting with its counterparts in Venezuela after its leader called a former Spanish president 'a bloodthirsty murderer'.
Nicolás Maduro, who took over after Hugo Chávez lost his battle with cancer, says PP president José María Aznar 'promoted the Iraq war' alongside US leader George W Bush in 2003.
“There were 1.2 million people killed in Iraq thanks to Aznar, Spain's bloodthirsty murderer and ex-president,” announced Maduro during a public conference in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, on Friday.
Aznar was president until the 2004 elections in May, when he lost his seat to socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero due to having claimed the Madrid train bombings two months earlier were the work of Basque terrorists ETA rather than, as later transpired, Al-Qaeda.
One of the first actions taken by Zapatero when he gained power was to withdraw all Spanish troops from Iraq.
Maduro made these accusations in the context of blaming the USA for bringing down oil prices through its 'imperial game' of hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking'.
“They are destroying the earth's crust in the USA to get to oil which has flooded the world petroleum market – they're producing nine million barrels a day, lots of oil, and have brought down the price of fuel as part of their geo-political power struggle to take over the world and to hit Russia where it hurts,” stormed Maduro.
Calling the United States 'the world imperial petroleum vampire', the Venezuelan leader added: “It wasn't enough for them to have destroyed Libya like they did. Nowadays, oil fields are controlled by terrorist groups.”
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