This much is clear: there's something about gyrating ladies in South American clubs that drives all common sense right out of U.S. government officials' heads. We're just past the one year anniversary of the infamous Secret Service agents at a Colombian brothel incident, and now we've got a new tawdry scandal on our hands.
This time, the location is Venezuela, and the perpetrators are two U.S. diplomats who may well have shot each other at a Caracas strip club.
Details are still sketchy on the incident, but State Department officials have confirmed that two employees from the embassy were shot at a strip club early on Tuesday morning.
"Medical staff inform us that their injuries do not appear to be life threatening," William Ostick, a State Department spokesman, tells the AP.
This morning, though, the AP has tracked down employees from the club, Antonella, who say that rather than falling victim to Caracas' notoriously violent crime, the two Americans actually shot each other.
"They were fighting with each other," Deisy Ron, the club's artistic director, tells the AP. "One of them pulled out a gun and shot the other in the stomach and the leg."
Police, however, have yet to release any official word of what happened, though they did identify one of the victims as military attache Roberto Ezequiel Rosas and initially said the shooting followed a "brawl" at the club. (The other victim has yet to be named.)
Whoever is to blame for the shooting, it's sure to draw comparisons to last year's embarrassment in Cartagena, where 12 Secret Service agents were relieved of duty after hiring prostitutes to come to their hotel room.
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