Venezuela arrested two men in the gruesome stabbing murder of a promising young lawmaker and his partner in the apartment they shared in Caracas.  Although Venezuela’s murder rate is the second highest in the world, the government has all along intimated that these killings were not the by-product of a robbery.

The country’s supreme court said the two suspects Eduwin Torres and Carlos Garcia are accused of “the alleged commission of the crimes of aggravated homicide, conspiracy and other crimes.”  Torres was a police officer – Garcia was the bodyguard of 27-year old Robert Serra, a rising star in the ruling United Socialist Party of the late president Hugo Chavez and current President Nicolas Maduro who blamed “terrorist groups encouraged by sectors of Venezuela’s ultra-right and Colombian paramilitary groups”.

Since the murders of Maria Herrera and Robert Serra on 1 October, there has been a strange sense of gloating and taunting from some quarters.  Venezuela sought to block the Internet site of the conservative Argentine business magazine Infobae, after it repeatedly posted pictures of Serra’s naked, mutilated body on a table in the coroner’s examination room.  That brings the question, why would a business magazine post pictures of a dead guy from the other side of the continent?  Pretty weird. 

If convicted, Torres and Garcia face up to 30 years in prison.