VENEZUELA’S government has linked opposition parties to murders at this week’s regime change demonstrations — which dwindled on Thursday.

Interior and Justice Minister Nestor Reverol said the motorcycle-riding gunman who killed a 24-year-old woman on Wednesday was an active member of one of the parties organising the protests.

Ivan Pernia was captured on Wednesday night and confessed to killing Paola Ramirez in the western town of San Cristobal — as she took refuge in a square four blocks away from where a riot was taking place.

Mr Reverol said the prisoner is a member Vente Venezuela, a liberal party in the Democratic Unity Roundtable (Mud) coalition that organised the week of violent protests to demand early presidential elections.

The minister said the attack had been planned and that Mr Davila had also fired 20 shots at pro-government protesters.

Vente Venezuela was founded in 2012 by opposition die-hard Maria Corina Machado, who previously led the Sumate (Rise Up) group that organised the unsuccessful US-backed campaign for a recall referendum against late president Hugo Chavez in 2004.

In the capital Caracas, two more people lost their lives on Wednesday — teenage student Carlos Moreno and National Guard Sergeant Niumar Jose Sanclemente Barrios, the latter apparently falling victim to a sniper’s bullet.

Another woman remained in a critical condition in hospital after being hit on the head by a Mud militant as she walked beside a counter-demonstration in Caracas.

Meanwhile, some tens of thousands of Mud supporters turned out for a follow-up protest — a far cry from the millions they claimed on Wednesday.

Mud leaders at the gathering announced a change of tactics, calling for sit-ins to block roads and silent processions in white to commemorate the victims of their own violence.

MP Freddy Guevara, a member of the small Popular Will (VP) party whose leader Leopoldo Lopez has been jailed for inciting 2014’s putschist riots that left 43 dead, shouted: “Twenty days of resistance and we feel newly born.”

The government called on the Washington-based Organisation of American States to condemn the killings.

On Thursday night, pro-US regional governments, including those of Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, urged Caracas to “retake the path of democratic institutionality,” release Mr Lopez and other prisoners and set dates for elections.

But Bolivian President Evo Morales warned: “The plan of the empire is to overthrow the constitutional president elected by Venezuela ... as a warning to anti-imperialist governments.”