Oscar Perez

After months of evading the Venezuelan security, renegade helicopter pilot, Oscar Perez was killed by the police during a nine-hour siege near the country’s capital, Caracas on Monday.

Perez was labelled a terrorist by the Nicolas Maduro- led government after he threw grenades on the country’s Supreme Court building and fired shots at the Ministry of the Interior.

After the helicopter attack which registered no casualties, Perez later carried out a raid on a military police post in Los Teques, south -western Cararas on December 18, 2017 and carted away 29 rifles.

In a news conference on Tuesday after hours of uncertainty over the fate of Perez, the country’s Justice Minister, Nestor Reverol said Perez was among the seven ‘terrorists’ killed in the raid along with two of his accomplices in the attack on a military post as well as a woman whose identity has not yet been revealed.

The security forces numbering more than 150 had at about 9:00GMT tracked Perez down to a house where he was hiding along with other members of an anti -government cell which he founded.

During the siege,  Perez, who was a member of the forensic police (known as the CICPC by its initials in Spanish) for 15 years had posted a series of videos on Instagram saying that he had offered to give himself up but believed that the authorities were trying to kill him rather than negotiate his surrender.

“They are shooting at us with RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades). There are civilians inside here. We said we’d turn ourselves in but they don’t want to let us turn ourselves in, they want to kill us,” Perez had said in one of the videos.