Caracas (AFP) – US military strikes on Venezuela that resulted in the ouster of leader Nicolas Maduro damaged civilian buildings including science labs and a medicine warehouse, the government in Caracas said Wednesday. The early-morning weekend attack on Caracas and locations in three other states killed at least one civilian and 56 Venezuelan and Cuban soldiers, according to a variety of sources.
Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez had spoken of civilian casualties, but has yet to provide a detailed rundown, while AFP spoke to the family of a 78-year-old woman who died after a strike on her apartment building in the port city of La Guaira.
Science and Technology Minister Gabriela Jimenez shared footage Wednesday on social media showing a destroyed building she said had housed the mathematics center of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) on the outskirts of Caracas. “Two missiles struck the area directly,” she wrote on Telegram and shared images of crumbled walls, twisted steel and fragments of what the post claimed was an AGM-154 American glide bomb.
“The attack was total: these areas housed servers and equipment essential to our computer networks that were completely devastated,” Jimenez added. Four other IVIC buildings housing centers for the study of physics, chemistry, ecology and nuclear technology were damaged, the minister added, lambasting “an unprecedented act of imperial aggression.”
The governor of La Guaira state said the strikes also destroyed a medicine warehouse there. “Tons of medicine burned to ash, tons of food,” Alejandro Teran said in a video on social media, without providing evidence that the destroyed goods were indeed medical supplies.
© 2024 AFP
