NEW YORK — The man the indictment calls Victim-9 has no name on the page, only an injury. Prosecutors say Venezuelan officers beat him for two days and left him with permanent damage to an eye. He was freed on January 15, about two weeks after Nicolás Maduro was ousted, and warned not to say the government had harmed him.
On Thursday, Maduro faced the count that now carries that man’s story. He and his wife, Cilia Flores, were before Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan and were recorded as pleading not guilty. Asked how he pleaded, Maduro said “I reject this document in its entirety,” and called the torture accusations false, according to ABC News. The couple have been jailed in Brooklyn since the US military raid in Caracas on January 3.
The new count, conspiracy to commit torture, sits in a superseding indictment unsealed on October 8. It joins the narcoterrorism, cocaine-importation and weapons charges already pending, and trial is now set for June 14, 2027, ABC reported. Neither defendant is accused of carrying out torture personally. Prosecutors say Maduro “presided over this system of repression and torture,” and that Flores helped him develop it. That makes this a case about direction and knowledge, and all of it is allegation.
CBS News reported that during unrest in 2014 Maduro allegedly proposed abducting five to seven military officers suspected of disloyalty and extracting information through torture, and that Flores agreed. The indictment also quotes him urging enforcers to “squeeze them harder” when questioning detained military personnel.
The American victims are where the numbers get rough. FBI Director Kash Patel said the government tortured “over a dozen American citizens,” CBS reported, yet the indictment cites three, Al Jazeera reported. The accounts differ on when Victim-9 was beaten: ABC News places it in 2024, after an election Washington called a sham, while Al Jazeera says January 2025, after an arrest by mistake. TEH could not open the Justice Department release or the indictment itself, so each detail here rests on those outlets’ reading of it.
Maduro’s lawyers have asked Hellerstein to dismiss the drug case on head-of-state immunity, with argument set for November 17, TEH reported in September. Nothing in Thursday’s coverage says whether that motion reaches the torture count. His lawyer, Barry Pollack, said last week that his client denies the charges and “looks forward to his day in court.” No ruling on the legality of the raid has been reported, though Maduro told the court in January he had been “kidnapped,” Al Jazeera reported.
Washington is prosecuting a leader its own forces seized, before a court that has yet to rule on whether it may. Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, first called the seizure an “illegal, illegitimate kidnapping” and has since stayed close to the Trump administration. The government says over a dozen Americans were tortured. Who the rest are, and whether any will testify, the public record does not say.
