Venezuela’s socialist regime will request an arrest warrant for Argentine President Javier Milei, his sister and General Secretary of the Presidency Karina Milei, and Security Minister Patricia Bullrich for the “theft” of a state-owned cargo airplane linked to Iran.
Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab announced the plan on Wednesday evening.
The airplane, a Boeing 747-300 bearing the registration code YV353, belonged to Emtrasur, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned Conviasa airline. The plane, and its Venezuelan-Iranian crew, landed in Argentina in June 2022 and remained there after neighboring Uruguay refused to grant it permission to fly through its territory.
Argentine authorities detained the crew and seized the plane in August 2022 following a request from the U.S. Department of Justice, which determined that the plane originally belonged to Mahan Air, an Iranian airline affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-Qods Force, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
American authorities also determined that the plane’s transfer to the Venezuelan state-owned company violated sanctions on Iran.
The plane was seized through a court order at a time when Argentina was under the administration of socialist former President Alberto Fernández. Following a series of legal proceedings, Argentine courts ruled that the country should hand control of the plane over to the United States in February, roughly two months after President Milei took office in December 2023.
Saab accused Milei — without presenting proof — of being a “neo-Nazi fascist” and an “aircraft thief,” stressing that what happened with the aircraft “cannot go unpunished.”
The attorney general claimed that Milei is being investigated for the alleged crimes of “aggravated robbery, money laundering, unlawful deprivation of liberty, simulation of a punishable act, unlawful interference, rendering an aircraft unusable and criminal association.”
“[Milei] has become a brutal danger to the entire hemisphere, so he has no morals to attack Venezuelan democratic institutions,” Saab claimed.
Saab also announced the opening of an investigation into Milei and Security Minister Bullrich for “crimes against humanity” allegedly committed against violent protesters rioting against Milei’s administration, which Saab described as “genocide.”
“We have decided to appoint a prosecutor specialized in human rights to carry out the corresponding investigations,” Saab said. “They will have to answer to justice. A state can exercise universal jurisdiction.”
The Argentine Foreign Ministry repudiated the arrest warrants against Javier Milei, his sister Karina Milei, and Security Ministry Bullrich in a statement released shortly afterward in which it explained that the airplane’s case was resolved by the judiciary, “an independent power over which the Executive cannot and should not have any interference whatsoever, in application of an international agreement.”
“The Argentine Government reminds the Venezuelan regime that in the Argentine Republic the division of powers and the independence of judges prevail, something that unfortunately does not occur in Venezuela under the regime of Nicolás Maduro,” the statement concluded.
Similarly, Foreign Minister Diana Mondino expressed through a social media post her “absolute support” to Milei, his sister, and Bullrich “in the face of the cowardly arrest warrant issued by the dictatorship in Venezuela.”
“Maduro once again demonstrates that he is a tyrant, and that we are on the right side of history,” the message read. “We are not afraid.”
Argentine presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni mocked the declaration in a statement reading, “the level of delirium is astronomical.”
At the time of the Emtrasur plane’s seizure, Argentine authorities also suspected that its pilot, Gholamreza Ghasemi, was a member of the IRGC-Qods Force after IRGC-related media was found on Ghasemi’s phone — including pictures of Mohsen Rezai, one of the individuals responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), the deadliest terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Ghasemi denied being affiliated with the Iranian terrorist force in an interview in September 2022 to Al Mayadeen, an outlet affiliated with the Iranian-backed Shiite jihadist terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro responded to the seizure of the plane in 2022 by throwing an expletive-laced tantrum on a mandatory television broadcast.
“We are very pissed off about what is happening in Argentina, very pissed off, and very indignant about the theft of the plane in Argentina!” he shouted.
Maduro ordered his regime to launch a widespread “protest” campaign that included forcing public workers to participate in mandatory rallies to protest both Argentina and the United States and commissioned a crudely-animated “cartoon” to portray the Venezuelan-Iranian crew as “victims.”
The Argentine outlet Infobae reported in June 2022 that Emtrasur functioned as a “ghost company,” with no public presence, website, or phone number publicly available.
Conviasa was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Treasury in 2020 during the administration of former President Donald Trump due to the Maduro regime’s continued use of the airline to “shuttle corrupt regime officials around the world to fuel support for its anti-democratic efforts.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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