ABSTRACT
At approximately 10.30 p.m. on the evening of Monday 27 June 2005, six students (three men and three women) left the campus of a private university in Caracas to go home after taking an evening exam. Crammed into a small car, they began to traverse the city as the driver dropped off his friends at their homes. Their first destination was Caricuao, a lower-middle class neighbourhood where two of the women lived. As they drove through the relatively deserted streets, they came upon a group of armed men and were told to stop. Apparently fearing that they were about to be robbed, the driver kept going and – aware of it or not – ran through a mobile checkpoint. Shots were fired at the vehicle, which finally came to a halt. The driver was killed in the car, while the other two men were killed (apparently execution-style) on the street. Each woman received one or more serious bullet wounds, but all survived. The group that was involved in the shooting was found to comprise 21 officers from military intelligence, four from the judicial investigation agency and one from the Caracas police. They were apparently looking for someone who had recently killed a police officer.
