US President Donald Trump has denied his administration was involved in what Venezuela called a plot to kill its president. Two Americans were arrested after they attempted to reach the county by sea.
“It has nothing to do with our government,” Trump insisted on Tuesday, after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that 13 terrorist tried to invade the country from Colombia and “two Americans from Donald Trump’s security team were in the raiding group.”
Among the thirteen men arrested during the failed invasion were two American mercenaries, identified as Luke Denman and Airan Berry. Both allegedly carried ID cards marking them as employees of Florida-based security services firm Silvercorp. The company’s owner confirmed to several news agencies that “those are my guys,” and Denman’s mother confirmed to CNN that her son was missing.
Venezuelan authorities nabbed the infiltrators on Sunday morning, along with a sizable cache of machine guns, military rifles and ammunition. A $212 million contract leaked online indicated the mercenaries were hired by the self-styled ‘interim president’ Juan Guaido, and while its authenticity has not been verified, the US-backed opposition figure has called for Maduro’s government to respect the “human rights… of the people captured.”
The invaders attempted to reach the Venezuelan port of La Guaira via speedboat but were intercepted in what appears to be a joint operation by the Venezuelan National Guard, police, and military counterintelligence.
Colombia’s Foreign Ministry has denied any involvement in the failed invasion, accusing the Maduro government of “look[ing] for distractions abroad in times of domestic crisis.”
The US State Department denounced a “disinformation campaign” by Maduro’s “regime” that made it difficult to separate facts from propaganda about the incident, saying it would look closely at the role of Caracas and Cuban intelligence in the entire “melodrama.”
The US has blamed Cuba and Russia for “propping up” Maduro, after Guaido’s repeated failures to seize power in Caracas since Washington recognized his claim in January 2019.
Maduro had fingered the two American invaders as members of Trump’s own “security team.” However, a former business partner at Silvercorp claimed that while the mercenary firm’s owner had been introduced to Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, Schiller had cut off contact with him after finding him naive and afflicted by delusions of grandeur.
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