TWO of four suspects in the murder of a retired Venezuelan general have been identified as police from an opposition-controlled district of the capital.

Major General Felix Velasquez was gunned down in front of his five-year-old granddaughter on Saturday by two men on a motorcycle in the Santa Monica district of Caracas.

He had been a senior commander in the Bolivarian National Militia, a popular reserve force founded by late president Hugo Chavez and an important pillar of Venezuela’s budding socialist revolution.

President Nicolas Maduro attended the general’s funeral yesterday at Fort Tiuna in Caracas.

Interior, Justice and Peace Minister Gustavo Gonzalez said on Sunday that of the four suspects detained so far, two were police officers from the wealthy Chacao district, a hotbed of violent opposition protests against the United Socialist Party government. He told Venezolana de Television that the assassination was staged to look like a robbery.

Mr Gonzalez said the pair “acted in combination with a criminal gang dedicated to homicide and contract killings.”

Venezuela’s police forces are highly fragmented, being largely organised on a local level with no control from central government.

Chacao was recently the scene of rioting during protests organised by the right-wing Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) alliance, which won a two-thirds majority in parliament in December’s elections.

Police were attacked and seven thugs arrested, including known participants in the 2014 “guarimba” regime-change riots that left 43 people dead.

One of those arrested claimed that they had been paid by a Mud MP’s chief of security “to participate in violent acts.”

The protests were called to demand the National Electoral Council (CNE) fast-track the validation of signatories to a petition calling for a presidential recall referendum, which must take place before January 10 if there is to be new election.

On Sunday the CNE’s signatures review commission chief Jorge Rodriguez said that about 40 per cent of the more than three million signatures submitted so far had been rejected.

“One in every two signatures is fake,” he said. “They got the dead to sign, got people to sign twice, put people who aren’t on the electoral register. This is a completely fraudulent act.”