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By Deisy Buitrago and Vivian Sequera
CARACAS (Reuters) -Former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez will be asked to testify about an opposition website where voting tallies from a disputed July election are posted, attorney general Tarek Saab said on Friday.
The move is the latest in a series of ruling party actions that the opposition and human rights groups have characterized as a crackdown on dissent following a disputed presidential election.
"In the coming hours the citizen Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia will be cited by this Public Ministry on the basis of the ongoing investigation, so he can give testimony about his responsibility, where he declares himself responsible for the webpage which is usurping ... the virtue and the jurisdiction that only corresponds to the electoral authorities," Saab told journalists in Caracas.
Venezuela's national electoral authority and its top court have named President Nicolas Maduro as the victor of the July 28 election with just over half of the votes, but the ballot box-level tallies posted by the opposition show a resounding victory for Gonzalez.
The opposition, some Western countries and international bodies like a United Nations panel of experts have said the vote was not transparent and demanded publication of full tallies by the government. Some made accusations of fraud.
Later on Friday, Gonzalez urged Venezuelans to join in defense of freedom and sovereignty of the people.
"It's no small thing at stake," he said in a post on X.
Ruling party officials including Maduro have accused the opposition of stoking violence and Saab this month launched criminal probes into opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, Gonzalez and the website.
Protests since the vote have led to 2,400 arrests, human rights groups have said. The government puts the number of dead at 27.
Detentions of opposition figures and protesters have continued in the weeks since the vote. The ruling party-controlled national assembly passed a law tightening rules on NGOs, while unions denounced alleged forced resignations of state employees espousing pro-opposition views.
There are currently 1,674 political prisoners in the country, the most so far this century, legal rights NGO Foro Penal said on social media on Friday. The tally does not include those who have been released or people held for 48 hours or less.
The U.S. has drafted a list of about 60 Venezuelan government officials and family members who could be sanctioned in the first punitive measures following the election, two people close to the matter told Reuters.
The top court's ratification of Maduro's victory "lacks all credibility" and there is "overwhelming evidence" that Gonzalez received the most votes, the U.S. State Department said on Friday. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his government would await local vote tallies before recognizing a winner.
(Reporting by Vivian Sequera, Deisy Buitrago and Mayela ArmasWriting by Julia Symmes Cobb and Oliver Griffin; Editing by David Gregorio and Daniel Wallis)
