Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is back in a Manhattan courthouse for a pretrial hearing in his US drug trafficking case. Maduro, 63, and his wife, Cilia Flores, 69, have been held at a Brooklyn jail since U.S. forces seized them from their Caracas home in a middle-of-the-night raid and brought them to New York in early January.
Background
Both have pleaded not guilty. They face potential life prison sentences if a jury agrees that they were part of a conspiracy to send cocaine into the U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has defended the raid as a “surgical law enforcement operation” in a criminal case first brought six years ago.
Maduro has called himself a prisoner of war and his capture a kidnapping. U.S. prosecutors say Maduro carried out a conspiracy to move thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. by colluding with Venezuelan law enforcement to help drug kingpins.
“I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the constitutional president of my country,” he said in Spanish at his arraignment in January. Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, has said he expects to contest the legality of Maduro’s “military abduction.”
Original reporting: KOAT Albuquerque — read the source article.
