United States President Donald Trump has said that Washington will “run” Venezuela until a political transition can take place, hours after US forces bombed the South American country and “captured” its president, Nicolas Maduro,
Al Jazeera reports.
Speaking during a news conference on Saturday, Trump said the US would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.
“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he said.
The Trump administration launched attacks on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and seized Maduro and his wife in the early hours of Saturday.
A plane carrying the Venezuelan leader landed in New York state on Saturday evening, according to US media.
Footage broadcast by CNN, Fox News and MS Now showed US officials escorting a person they identified as Maduro off a plane at the Stewart international airport, about 97 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of New York City.
Maduro’s capture took place after a months-long US pressure campaign against his government, which included US seizures of oil tankers off the Venezuelan coast, as well as deadly attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. The attacks were widely denounced as extrajudicial killings.
Washington had accused the Venezuelan leader, who has been in power since 2013, of having ties to drug cartels. Maduro had rejected the claim, saying the US was working to depose him and take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
