AKIPRESS.COM - Venezuelan security officials seized two opposition leaders from their homes in overnight raids, Reuters reported their families as saying on Tuesday, after they urged protests against a new legislative superbody widely denounced as anti-democratic.

Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma were both under house arrest, the former for his role in leading street protests against President Nicolas Maduro in 2014 and the latter on charges of plotting a coup.

"12:27 in the morning: the moment when the dictatorship kidnaps Leopoldo at my house," Lopez's wife Lilian Tintori wrote on Twitter.

She posted a link to a video that appeared to show Lopez being led into a vehicle emblazoned with the word Sebin, Venezuela's intelligence agency.

The Information Ministry did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Lopez and Ledezma are both former mayors in Caracas, and high-profile critics of Maduro.

They had called on Venezuelans to join protests over Sunday's election of the constituent assembly, which supersedes an opposition-controlled congress that a pro-Maduro Supreme Court had already stripped of its powers.