MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

US$ 1.3 million found in a Venezuelan airplane in the Dominican Republic

Authorities investigate whether the confiscated money was the product of an international drug trafficking transaction.

Dominican authorities found 1,378,178 million dollars inside a private plane with Venezuelan registration. It is being investigated if the confiscated money was the product of an international drug trafficking transaction.

The airplane, scheduled to fly to Venezuela, in which the cash was found involved two men and a woman from the South American country that was arrested and will face justice in the Dominican Republic in the next hours. According to authorities, the detainees claimed that they did not know that the money was in the aircraft.

The detainees are the pilot Claudio A. Di Genova and the passengers are Estela Gómez de Rodríguez and Jonnathan Luiciano del Valle Mata Figueroa, according to Diario Libre sources.

According to files found by El Pitazo, Mata Figueroa (39) is an officer graduated from the Venezuelan Academy of Military Aviation in 2007, with the rank of lieutenant. He was assigned to the Ministry of Defense.

Of the aircraft, of registration YV2887, it was learned that it is impossible to track with the use of tracking services of civil aviation, due to the fact that it has a follow-up ban.

However, sources in the aeronautical sector informed El Pitazo that the aircraft usually remains parked in an airport in Suriname and practically does not visit Venezuelan territory.

The authorities explained that they are deepening the investigations to establish if it is an organized crime network dedicated to drug trafficking and the laundering of assets resulting from that criminal activity.

They detailed that the operation was carried out after an intelligence work within the framework of the plan jointly carried out by these institutions to effectively combat the different forms of organized crime.

The investigations establish that the pilots arrived in the country last Saturday afternoon and that they received the money that same day in a plaza in Santo Domingo, later staying in a villa in La Romana.