Watch live: Maduro and his wife arrive in New York to face narcoterrorism charges

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife arrived Saturday afternoon at Stewart Air National Guard Base, just north of New York, hours after their capture in a daring operation. American military operation in Caracas.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured overnight at their home in Caracas. They were transported to the warship USS Iwo Jima before being flown to New York to face criminal charges.

Two sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that Maduro and Flores are expected to be taken to court. Metropolitan Detention Centera federal facility in Brooklyn, which will be housed.

In a quashing the indictment Filed in the Southern District of New York against Maduro, members of his family and his cabinet, the United States accuses the South American leader of conspiring to commit narcoterrorism and importing cocaine. He is also accused of possession and conspiracy to possess “machine guns and destructive devices,” according to the indictment unveiled Saturday by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil, in American courts,” Bondi said.

The charges appear to be the same as those that were filed in a 2020 indictment of Maduro and several key collaborators.

The indictment, prepared by New York U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, states: “For more than 25 years, Venezuela’s leaders have abused their position of public trust and corrupted once-legitimate institutions to import tons of cocaine into the United States,” before alleging that Maduro “is at the forefront of this corruption and has joined forces with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he has corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine in the United States.

The U.S. government also claimed that Flores was involved in her husband’s alleged crimes. According to the indictment, Flores allegedly brokered a meeting between a large-scale drug trafficker and the director of Venezuela’s National Anti-Drug Office, Nestor Reverol Torres, and accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in 2007.

The trafficker arranged a bribe for Reverol Torres – $100,000 per flight – to ship cocaine, prosecutors say. Reverol Torres was indicted in 2015 by US prosecutors in New York.

In the indictment filed against Maduro in 2020, federal prosecutors alleged that the Venezuelan leader and other senior Venezuelan government officials collaborated with the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, to traffic cocaine and weapons to the United States.

Maduro has in the past denied the accusations against him.

Hours after the operation, President Trump declared that the United States would rule Venezuela at least temporarily and exploit its vast oil reserves to sell to other countries.