CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – President Hugo Chavez said Friday that diplomatic and commercial relations with Colombia would be suspended until it apologized for paying bounty hunters to snatch a senior rebel from inside Venezuela.

But Colombian President Alvaro Uribe remained unapologetic late Friday, defending his country’s “right to free itself from the nightmare of terrorism.”

The sharply worded statements came a day after Venezuela recalled its ambassador in response to Colombia’s admission that it sent police and bribed local authorities to act as bounty hunters to capture Rodrigo Granda, a leader in the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

“I’ve ordered all agreements and business with Colombia to be paralyzed,” Chavez said in a speech before Congress Friday. “With much pain I have called back the ambassador in Bogota and he will not return until the Colombian government offers us apologies.”

Chavez said the move includes freezing a July agreement to build a $200 million natural gas pipeline from Venezuela to Colombia’s Pacific coast, which would allow Venezuelan fuel to be more easily shipped to the United States and Asia.

“From any point of view, it is unjustifiable that high Colombian officials are bribing Venezuelan authorities,” Chavez said to rousing applause in the national assembly.

In a statement from his office, Colombia’s Uribe called the use of bounty hunters a legitimate instrument to fight terrorism and said “the United Nations prohibits member nations from providing safe haven to terrorists in an ‘active or passive’ manner.”

He reiterated Colombia’s desire to have good relations with Venezuela but stressed that Colombian police “have not violated Venezuela’s sovereignty.”

The Colombian ambassador in Caracas, Enrique Vargas Ramirez, attended Chavez’s speech and later told the state news agency Venpres: “It doesn’t seem to me that the diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Colombia are broken through these actions, but the situation is serious.”

According to Venzuela’s Interior Minister Jesse Chacon, the Dec. 13 capture of rebel Granda in Caracas was a clear “violation of sovereignty.”

Chacon said the abduction was planned by Colombian authorities and that Colombian police entered Venezuela ahead of time to coordinate Granda’s “kidnapping.”

Five Venezuelan National Guard troops and three army officers have been detained for involvement in the kidnapping of Granda.

Investigators say Granda was turned over to authorities Dec. 14 in the Colombian border city of Cucuta, Chacon said. It was there that Colombian authorities originally said they nabbed Granda.

But after days of pronouncements by Venezuelan officials – including Chavez – that the Colombian police were lying, Colombia on Wednesday acknowledged it paid bounty hunters an unspecified sum for the capture.

Venezuelan officials have said four Colombian police officers were detained in an area frequented by Granda days before his capture. The four were suspected of taking photographs of military installations in the city of Maracay, but were later released without charges.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan Prosecutor General Isaias Rodriguez told Venpres that prosecutors had decided to take legal action against Colombian Defense Minister Jorge Alberto Uribe for his statements acknowledging Colombia had paid for the rebel’s capture.

Rodriguez also said prosecutors would move against a Colombian police officer who entered Venezuela to help coordinate the capture. He said once the “penal responsibility” for those acts has been determined, “we are going to request from Colombian the extradition of high-ranking Colombian officials who are responsible for that crime.”

The director of Colombia’s National Exporters’ Association, Javier Diaz said the row was not likely to harm economic relations between the two nations.

“We have had these sorts of disputes often in the past, but commercial relations were never affected, and the governments overcome their differences,” he said. “Only the projects that the two presidents have been working on together will be affected, like the gas pipeline.”

AP-ES-01-14-05 2050EST