Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is back in court for a pretrial hearing in his US drug trafficking case

By MICHAEL R. SISAK and LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) — Nicolás Maduro was returned Wednesday to a Manhattan courthouse where lawyers plan to request a June trial date for his drug trafficking case as his attorneys object to the U.S. military action that snatched the Venezuelan president from power and deposited him in New York.

Maduro, 63, and his wife, Cilia Flores, 69, have been held at a Brooklyn jail since U.S. forces seized them from their Caracas home in a middle-of-the-night raid and brought them to New York in early January.

Both have pleaded not guilty. They face potential life prison sentences if a jury agrees that they were part of a conspiracy to send cocaine into the U.S.

In a letter to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein before Wednesday’s hearing, prosecutors said lawyers will request that the trial be scheduled for June, with pretrial motions by defense lawyers to be filed by early September.

President Donald Trump’s administration has defended the raid as a “surgical law enforcement operation” in a criminal case first brought six years ago. Maduro has called himself a prisoner of war and his capture a kidnapping.

U.S. prosecutors say Maduro carried out a conspiracy to move thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. by colluding with Venezuelan law enforcement to help drug kingpins.

“I am not guilty. I am a decent man, the constitutional president of my country,” he said in Spanish at his arraignment in January.

Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, has said he expects to contest the legality of Maduro’s “military abduction.”

The lawyers have said there are complex legal defenses that the court must address before a trial can begin.

Maduro and Flores have not asked to be released on bail.