Bolivia’s government has accused former president Evo Morales of staging an attempt on his own life, saying that the shots fired at his car on Sunday came after he tried to run a police checkpoint. “Mr Morales, nobody believes the theater you have staged,” the interior minister, Eduardo del Castillo, told a news conference. He added that Morales, who claims the government tried to kill him, would “have to answer … for the crime of attempted murder” of a police officer. Del Castillo claimed the car in which Morales was traveling failed to stop at a checkpoint set up by police to combat drug trafficking in central Chapare province, one of the country’s biggest producers of coca, the raw material for cocaine. He said that the police motioned for the vehicle to slow down and stop but that the driver instead accelerated, and that “shots were fired from a vehicle”. He said that an officer was run over but survived, before a police patrol gave chase to Morales’s car and fired on it. Morales, who is engaged in a weeks-long standoff with his former ally turned rival President Luís Arce, said on Sunday his car was riddled with bullets by assailants with their faces covered while he was traveling to a radio station in the city of Cochabamba. He said his driver was wounded but he was unharmed. The radio station released a video that it said was of the pickup truck in which Morales was traveling. It shows three bullet holes on the windshield and the driver with blood on his head.