MADRID — The Spanish police said on Wednesday that they were searching for Hugo Carvajal, the former intelligence chief of Venezuela, after Spain’s national court reversed an earlier decision and ordered the extradition of Mr. Carvajal to the United States to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.

The search for Mr. Carvajal is the latest twist in an international game of cat and mouse since the Spanish police first detained him last April. He was released from a Spanish jail in September after the American extradition request was first rejected. The court ruled that the claims made against him were too “abstract” to establish his individual involvement in drug trafficking.

Last September, the Spanish court also accepted the defense’s argument that the American request was politically motivated, saying that the United States wanted to extradite Mr. Carvajal because the move would be “within the American political strategy toward Venezuela.”

Spanish prosecutors appealed, however, and the ruling was reversed last week, reactivating the arrest warrant for Mr. Carvajal. A spokesman for the national court said that details of the ruling were not yet public, so it remains unclear why the decision was changed.