CARACAS, Sept 24: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused on Saturday his American counterpart George Bush of ordering his assassination for calling the US leader ‘the devil’ during his speech at the United Nations last week.

“The devil appears very sulphurous, and a few people say that he has given the order to kill me,” Mr Chavez said during a speech before scientists in Venezuela.

“Many concerned friends have called me, (saying) that because I said ‘devil’ over there (at the United Nations), they have sentenced me to die.

They will not kill me, I have much faith in life,” Mr Chavez added.

The leftist Venezuelan leader called Mr Bush ‘the devil’, ‘a liar’ and a ‘tyrant’ during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday — one day after Mr Bush spoke from the same podium.

Mr Chavez again showed on Saturday a copy of ‘Hegemony or Survival’, a book by left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky that he had brandished during his controversial speech at the General Assembly.

He said he had to wash the book ‘with holy water because I put it in the same place that the devil put his papers’.—AFP