President Hugo Chávez broadened his assault on Venezuela's independent press last night, accusing CNN and another television channel of trying to unsettle the Government while police dispersed thousands of protesters with blockades, water cannons and tear gas.

On a day of already heightened tension surrounding the closure of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), Venezuela's most prominent independent broadcaster, officials turned their sights on Globovisión, a local television network and CNN, the US cable news network, accusing them of plotting against the Government.

The Information Minister, William Lara, showed a press conference what he said was CNN footage of Mr Chávez juxtaposed with images of Osama bin Laden, saying: “CNN broadcast a lie which linked President Chavez to violence and murder". He also accused CNN of dishonesty for using footage of a Mexican demonstration in a story about the current Venezuelan disturbances.

As for Globovisión, Mr Lara said that the Government was suing the channel for "the offence of incitement to assassination" because it aired footage of the attempted murder, in 1981, of the late Pope John Paul II in Rome. Mr Lara said the images, which were played with a slogan "Have faith, this doesn’t end here" constituted an incitement to murder Mr Chávez.

Alberto Federico Ravell, a director of Globovisión, called the allegations "ridiculous" while Tony Maddox, a vice president of CNN International, said that the network had already given a detailed apology for the mistake in using footage from Mexico and "denies categorically being engaged in a campaign to discredit or attack Venezuela".

As for the image of Mr Chávez next to bin Laden, Mr Maddox said that “unrelated news stories can be juxtaposed in a given segment of television news in the same way that a newspaper page or a website can have news items with no relation to each other placed side by side".

The accusations came on a day in which opposition activists, journalists and students from every university in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, joined protests against the closure of RCTV, the country's oldest television station, whose licence was not renewed by the Government and allowed to expire at midnight on Sunday.

Simultaneous demonstrations in Valencia, 150km (93 miles) west of Caracas, led to clashes with local police, where nine people were injured.

In the capital, police fired tear gas bombs and rubber bullets from a raised section of road to disrupt the protesters, who gathered at around 3.30pm yesterday in the Chacaíto district.

Many knelt in front of riot police to show that the peaceful intention of the demonstration before breaking up. They later regrouped in Caracas’s Plaza Brion, where they were led by Miguel Angel Rodriguez, a talk show host from RCTV, who told the crowd: "What they want is to silence us, but we are not afraid. They will not silence us."

The protest culminated with a visit to the headquarters of Globovisión, where Mr Ravell went out to meet the crowd, which was described by Leopoldo Lopez, the neighbourhood mayor and an opposition figure, as the first mass student demonstration against Mr Chávez in his eight years of power.

The Venezuelan President, presently using emergency powers to usher in the next phase of his socialist revolution, has justified the silencing of RCTV, which had been on the air since 1963, and its replacement with TVes, a new state channel, as a move to hand more broadcasting over to the people.

But he has provoked a vigorous reaction from the rest of the Venezuela's independent media sector, which fears for its freedom of expression, and from foreign governments and NGOs, which have condemned Mr Chávez for refusing to allow other independent broadcasters to compete for RCTV's licence.

Robert Menard, the secretary-general of Reporters With Borders, the free press group, has called the closure of RCTV Mr Chávez's “first serious international political error", while Germany, the EU president, has declared its concern at the developments. The Organisation of American States (OEA) has given warning that the current climate could lead to more self-censorship and a loss of editorial independence throughout Venezuela.

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