The United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores on Saturday and was flying them out of Venezuela to New York to face criminal charges, the New York Times reported.
The paper said Mr Maduro’s capture was a stunning culmination of a monthslong campaign by President Donald Trump’s administration to oust him from power.
The Times’s White House correspondent, Tyler Pager, wrote in live updates on the developing story that he had phoned Mr Trump just after 4:30am on Saturday morning after he announced the capture on social media to ask a few questions.
Mr Trump picked up the phone and celebrated the mission’s success.
“A lot of good planning and a lot of great, great troops and great people,” said the president, according to the reporter. “It was a brilliant operation, actually.”
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The reporter then asked if Mr Trump had sought congressional authority before the US military, along with law enforcement personnel, engaged in a “large scale strike,” as he wrote on social media.
“We’ll discuss that,” said Mr Trump. “We’re going to have a news conference.”
The call lasted 50 seconds, Mr Pager said.
US special operations forces captured Mr Maduro with the help of a CIA source within the Venezuelan government who had monitored his location in recent days, the Times reported, citing people briefed on the operation.
According to the Times, Mr Trump told Fox News in an interview that Mr Maduro and his wife had been taken to the USS Iwo Jima, one of the US warships that have been prowling the Caribbean, and would be taken to New York.
The BBC reported that Mr Trump’s move to topple Mr Maduro is fraught with risk.
It said the US would want the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado or the opposition candidate from the 2024 elections, Edmundo Gonzalez, to take power.
ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS OUR READERS OFTEN ASK
“However, even some strong critics of Maduro warn this would not be simple given the government’s grip on power in the country,” wrote Ione Wells, the BBC’s South America correspondent.
“It controls the judiciary, the Supreme Court, the military—and is aligned with powerfully armed paramilitaries known as ‘colectivos.’”
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