Maduro slams Milei after US seizes Venezuelan plane

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro lashed out at his Argentine counterpart Thursday, three days after the United States completed the seizure of a Venezuelan plane held in Buenos Aires since June 2022.

"They stole our plane... Milei the bandit stole the plane from Venezuela. Javier Milei, the hero of the extreme right," Maduro said in a televised statement about the Argentine president.

"He acts crazy or he is crazy or both at the same time," he added.

The Boeing 747 cargo plane owned by Venezuelan company Emtrasur has been held in Argentina since landing there in 2022 from Mexico with a shipment of auto parts.

The 19-member crew was composed of Venezuelans and Iranians – one of whom the United States suspected had links to the Al Quds Force, a group of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States.

All the crew were initially detained but later freed.

The plane was sold to Emtrasur, a subsidiary of state airline Conviasa, by Iran's Mahan Air in October 2021 which the US said contravened its sanctions against both countries.

Caracas and Tehran protested US attempts to seize the plane, but Argentine federal judge Federico Villena last month ordered it surrendered to the United States.

"The seized American-built aircraft was transferred by a sanctioned Iranian airline in a transaction that violated US export control laws and directly benefited the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a designated terrorist organisation," US Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division said in a statement this week.

"Mahan Air – known to ferry weapons and fighters for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah – violated our export restrictions by selling this aeroplane to a Venezuelan cargo airline. Now, it's property of the United States government," added Matthew Axelrod, US assistant secretary of export enforcement.