CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A popular soap-opera actress and former Miss Venezuela, 29-year-old Monica Spear, surely could have afforded to vacation elsewhere.

Yet she and her ex-husband, who worked in the travel industry, spent New Year’s in the mountains of western Venezuela with their five-year-old daughter, then visited the plains of Apure state.

On their return by car to Caracas, Spear and Thomas Henry Berry, a 39-year-old British citizen, became the latest symbols of the rampant violent crime that is afflicting this oil-rich nation.

Robbers shot and killed the two and wounded their daughter on an isolated stretch of highway when they tried to foil the assault by locking themselves inside their car, which had been disabled by tyre punctures, police said Tuesday.

The slayings late Monday outraged Venezuelans, triggering a wave of calls for action on social media. TV personality Camila Canabal expressed what many were feeling in a tweet: “Sadness, anger, indignation, impotence, shame and pain, pain, pain, dammit!!!”

“Monica and Thomas are the face of thousands of men and woman whose children have been left without parents because of the violence of Venezuela,” she added.

Their daughter, Maya, was in stable condition after treatment for a leg wound and was with relatives in Caracas, authorities said.

Fatal shootings are common in armed robberies in Venezuela, and rampant kidnapping has ensnared even foreign ambassadors and professional baseball players.

Violent crime soared during the 14-year rule of Hugo Chavez, who died of cancer last March. The country has one of the world’s highest murder rates — the United Nations has ranked fifth globally.

The slaying of Spear and her ex-husband followed a pattern of late-night assaults carried out by disabling cars with obstacles placed on roadways.

Their four-door sedan hit “a sharp object that had been placed on the highway” which punctured at least two of its tyres, the director of the country’s investigative police, Jose Gregorio Sierralta, told reporters.

Two tow trucks arrived almost immediately afterward, said Sierralta, and the attack occurred after the car had been lifted onto one of the trucks.

Seeing the assailants coming, the travellers locked themselves inside and the assailants fired at least six shots, he said.

“They fired with viciousness,” President Nicolas Maduro said of the attackers.

Police in Puerto Cabello arrested five suspects, some under the age of 18, Sierralta said. It could not immediately be determined if Spear and Berry had called the tow trucks, or if any of the drivers were among those arrested for suspected involvement in the killings.

Maduro lamented “the loss of a very spiritual young woman” actively involved in various charities, including one that helped placed mentally disabled teens in jobs.

One top opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez, blamed Spear’s death squarely on the government: “This government is an accomplice of armed groups, judicial corruption, arms trafficking,” he tweeted.

In response to the killings, Maduro announced that he would convene an urgent security meeting that had originally been scheduled for the end of January. It is to bring together state governors and mayors of Venezuela’s 79 most dangerous cities.

Spear was crowned Miss Venezuela in 2004, was fifth runner-up in the Miss Universe pageant the following year and had acted in numerous soap operas, most recently in “Pasion Prohibida” for the US-based Telemundo network.