Triple murderer among 10 inmates released back to the US as part of prisoner swap with Venezuela
Dahud Hanid Ortiz, 55, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in Caracas last year after he killed three people in Madrid in 2016.
He was one of the American citizens flown to Texas on Friday as part of a deal between the White House and the Nicolas Maduro regime in Venezuela.
The Trump administration said the Americans had been political prisoners in the country, with Secretary Marco Rubio saying: 'Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland.'
But the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal warned that one of them was a murderer, not a dissident, as reported by El Pais.
It is not clear if Ortiz was transferred to a prison after landing in Texas last week.
Daily Mail has reached out to the State Department for comment on this story.
After the prisoner swap, Venezuelan regime leader Diosdado Cabello appeared to troll the US, saying: 'We handed over some murderers for you.'
Ortiz was born in Venezuela, but became a naturalized US citizen after serving in Iraq.
He was arrested in Caracas in 2018 after he fled Spain following the murders.
Spanish police said Ortiz meant to kill his ex-wife's new boyfriend, lawyer Víctor Joel Salas, but instead killed the wrong man and two law clerks at a law firm.
Salas told Spanish media he feels betrayed after Ortiz was sent to the US.
'Both my family and I feel deceived, betrayed, and frustrated,' he said.
Venezuela on Friday released 10 jailed American citizens and permanent residents in exchange for scores of migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador months ago under the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
Aside from Ortiz, the Americans were among dozens of people, including activists, opposition members and union leaders, that Venezuela's regime took into custody in its brutal campaign to crack down on dissent over the last year.
'Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement in which he thanked El Salvador president Nayib Bukele.
Bukele said El Salvador had handed over all the Venezuelan nationals in its custody.
Maritza Osorio Riverón was Ortiz' third victim. Spanish police said Ortiz meant to kill his ex-wife's new boyfriend but targeted the wrong man and two assistants at a law firm
Central to the deal were more than 250 Venezuelan migrants freed by El Salvador, which in March agreed to a $6 million payment from the Trump administration to house them in its notorious prison.
That arrangement drew immediate blowback when Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to quickly remove the men that his administration had accused of belonging to the violent Tren de Aragua street gang, teeing up a legal fight that reached the Supreme Court. The administration did not provide evidence to back up those claims.
The Venezuelans had been held in a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which was built to hold alleged gang members in Bukele's war on the country's gangs.
Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths as well as cases of torture inside its walls.
Photos and videos released by El Salvador's government on Friday showed shackled Venezuelans sitting in a fleet of buses and boarding planes surrounded by officers in riot gear.
One man looked up and pointed toward the sky as he climbed aboard a plane, while another made an obscene gesture toward police.
One of the men is reportedly Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled Venezuela last year and was taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody at a border crossing in San Diego before eventually being flown to El Salvador.
Maduro described Friday as 'a day of blessings and good news for Venezuela.' He called it 'the perfect day for Venezuela.'
The release of the Venezuelans, meanwhile, is an invaluable win for Maduro as he presses his efforts to assert himself as president despite credible evidence that he lost reelection last year.
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In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
