This is the moment a Venezuelan soldier allegedly fires a man-portable air defence system (MANPADS) missile at a US helicopter over Caracas only to miss – with the chopper returning fire seconds later.
The clash occurred during America’s daring mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife at their fortified compound.
The audacious attack, dubbed ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’, involved more than 150 aircraft launched from 20 bases around the Western Hemisphere, including F-35 and F-22 jets, and B-1 bombers.
Footage purportedly shows a Venezuelan security forces firing a missile from a Russian Igla MANPADS at an American helicopter near the Fuerte Tiuna military base in Caracas.
As the surface-to-air missile veered off course and missed its target, US soldiers retaliated with 30 mm fire within three to four seconds of the launch.
One week before the operation took place, US President Donald Trump phoned Maduro privately and gave him one last chance to flee, but the dictator refused to budge.
With the pieces in place, Trump approved the operation five days ago, but military and intelligence planners suggested he wait for better weather and less cloud cover.
On Friday, at 10.46pm in Washington (3.46am on Saturday in the UK), Trump gave final authorisation for the lightning raid, telling his team of Delta Force soldiers and pilots: ‘Good luck and Godspeed.’
By 4.21am (9.21am GMT) on Saturday morning, Trump had posted a message on his Truth Social platform: the US had carried out a daring mission to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife.
The mission came as a surprise, but according to sources close with the matter, planning for one of the most complex US operations in recent memory had been in the works for months and included detailed rehearsals.
In total, more than 15,000 troops have poured into the region for what US officials have long described as anti-drug operations.
According to one of the sources, Trump senior aide Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe formed a core team working on the issue for months with regular – sometimes daily – meetings and phone calls.
They often also met with the president.
Elite US troops, including the Army’s Delta Force, created an exact replica of Maduro’s safe house and practiced how they would enter the strongly fortified residence.
The troops ran drills similar to the exercises performed on the mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad home used before the 2011 raid that killed the al-Qaeda leader.
The CIA also had an asset close to Maduro who would monitor his movements and was poised to pinpoint his exact location as the operation unfolded.
For months, the team – including one source within the Venezuelan government – had been spying on Maduro, recording where he slept, what he ate, what he wore and even, according to top military officials, ‘his pets’.
Late on Friday night and into early Saturday, Trump and his advisers huddled as a number of US aircraft took off and carried out strikes against targets inside and close to Caracas, including air defense systems.
The aircraft included helicopters carrying an extraction force that began their flight into Venezuela at just 100ft above the water, according to Gen Dan Caine, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff.
‘We had a fighter jet for every possible situation,’ Trump told Fox News Channel’s ‘Fox & Friends’.
Sources have told Reuters the Pentagon had also quietly moved into the region refueling air tankers, drones and aircraft specialising in electronic jamming.
With the strikes taking place, US Special Forces made their way into Caracas heavily armed, including with a blowtorch in case they had to cut through steel doors at Maduro’s location.
Around 1am EST Saturday, troops arrived at Maduro’s compound in downtown Caracas while being fired upon.
One of the helicopters was hit, but still able to fly.
Social media videos posted by residents showed a convoy of helicopters flying over the city at low altitude.
Once they reached Maduro’s safe house the troops, along with FBI agents, made their way into the residence, which Trump described as a ‘very highly guarded … fortress’.
‘They just broke in, and they broke into places that were not really able to be broke into, you know, steel doors that were put there for just this reason,’ Trump said. ‘They got taken out in a matter of seconds.’
Once the troops were inside the safe house, Maduro and his wife surrendered. Trump said the Venezuelan leader had tried to reach a safe room but was unable to close the door.
‘He got bum rushed so fast that he didn’t get into that,’ Trump said.
Trump suggested Saturday that America used cyberattacks or other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas.
If true, the intervention would mark one of the most public uses of US cyber power against another country in recent memory.
Such missions are typically highly classified, and the US is understood as one of the most advanced nations in cyberspace operations globally.
‘It was dark, the lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have, it was dark, and it was deadly,’ Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago detailing the operation.
NetBlocks, a watchdog monitoring cybersecurity and the governance of the Internet, spoke of a loss of Internet connectivity in Caracas during power cuts early Saturday morning.
Alp Toker, founder of NetBlocks, said in an email Saturday that if cyberattacks contributed to these outages, ‘it will have been targeted, not impacting the broader network space,’ wrote Politico.
Last month, Venezuelan national oil and gas company PDVSA accused the White House of carrying out a cyberattack that crippled the country’s petroleum infrastructure, forcing the suspension of operations at loading terminals for three days.
The CIA was also accused of carrying out a clandestine cyberattack against Maduro in the final year of Trump’s first administration, disabling his intelligence service’s computer network, according to CNN.
Another explanation behind the lights going off in Caracas is that America deployed a ‘black out bomb’.
It is an ‘expertise’ the White House has demonstrated previously, in the Gulf War in 1991 and in Serbia in 1999, according to the Times.
The weapon refers to a BLU-114/B, full of metal cannisters containing strands of graphite.
When deployed by a larger missile, they float down on parachutes and detonate, raining down graphite filaments on substation or high-voltage power lines that cause short-circuits.
The use of the ‘black out bomb’ remains controversial. While the strike can plunge a city into darkness without damaging infrastructure, it is likely to shut down power at nearby hospitals.
In the spring of 2003 in Baghdad, witnesses noted lights went out just before the American-led invasion.
The US has not confirmed its use in Caracas.
Caine added that US Cyber Command, US Space Command and combatant commands ‘began layering different effects’ to ‘create a pathway’ for US forces flying into Venezuela early Saturday.
The chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not elaborate on what those ‘effects’ entailed.
Maduro is set to appear in Manhattan federal court on Monday to face narco-terrorism charges.
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