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Washington, Jan 4: United States President Donald Trump has said that Washington will “run” Venezuela until a political transition can take place, hours after US forces bombed the South American country and “captured” its president, Nicolas Maduro.

Speaking during a news conference on Saturday, Trump said the US would “run the country until we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.

“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he said.

The Trump administration launched attacks on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and seized Maduro and his wife in the early hours of Saturday.

A plane carrying the Venezuelan leader landed in New York state on Saturday evening, according to US media.

Footage broadcast by CNN, Fox News and MS Now showed US officials escorting a person they identified as Maduro off a plane at the Stewart international airport, about 97 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of New York City.

Maduro’s capture took place after a months-long US pressure campaign against his government, which included US seizures of oil tankers off the Venezuelan coast, as well as deadly attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. The attacks were widely denounced as extrajudicial killings.

Washington had accused the Venezuelan leader, who has been in power since 2013, of having ties to drug cartels. Maduro had rejected the claim, saying the US was working to depose him and take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

During Saturday’s news conference, Trump said that “very large United States oil companies” would move into Venezuela to “fix the badly broken… oil infrastructure and start making money for the country”.

He added that his administration’s actions “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe”.

These charges include “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States”, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said.

“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” she added in a post on X.

A Justice Department official told the Reuters news agency that Maduro is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday.

‘Illegal abduction’

But legal experts, world leaders and Democratic Party lawmakers in the US have condemned the administration’s actions as a violation of international law.

“Attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step towards a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on X.

Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, slammed what he called Washington’s “illegal abduction” of Maduro. “I condemn the US’ illegal aggression against Venezuela,” Saul wrote on social media.

A spokesperson for UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply alarmed” by the situation, describing the US’s actions as setting “a dangerous precedent”.

“The Secretary-General continues to emphasize the importance of full respect – by all – of international law, including the UN Charter. He’s deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected,” Guterres’s office said in a statement.

Earlier on Saturday, Venezuela’s defence minister released a defiant statement in response to the US attacks, urging people to remain united.