The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, announced this Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee of the United States that the agency captured in Venezuela the last fugitive on its list of the ten most wanted, thereby completing the arrest of all members on that list.
"This weekend we captured in Venezuela a criminal who was on our most wanted list and had been on the run for years," Patel stated during the press conference. The director did not immediately reveal the identity of the detainee, though he confirmed that they were already en route to the United States.
It was Fox News, citing a confirmation from the FBI itself, which identified the captured individual as Aníbal Alexander Canelón Aguirre, a Venezuelan known by the aliases "Prometheus" and "The Engineer."
Canelón Aguirre was added to the list on March 12, 2026, becoming the first "cyber fugitive" in the history of that list, which has existed since 1950 and has processed 541 individuals over its more than seven decades.
The FBI accuses him of leading an international conspiracy that deployed groups on U.S. soil to steal millions of dollars from financial institutions using a technique known as "ATM jackpotting": the use of malware to force the mass withdrawal of cash from ATMs.
According to investigations, the network operated since January 2024 and carried out more than 117 attacks against financial institutions in the United States, with confirmed losses of at least 5.4 million dollars.
The charges he faces include conspiracy to commit bank fraud, bank robbery, intentional damage to computer systems, money laundering, and providing material support to terrorists.
This last position is directly linked to the Tren de Aragua: the FBI states that the money obtained through jackpotting ended up in a money laundering network associated with that Venezuelan criminal organization, designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States.
A federal arrest warrant had been issued in December 2025 by a federal court in Nebraska, and the agency even offered up to one million dollars as a reward for information leading to his capture.
The historic leader of the Tren de Aragua, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as "Niño Guerrero," was taken out in a U.S. operation announced in June 2026, reflecting Washington's sustained pressure against that criminal network.
The capture of Canelón Aguirre on Venezuelan soil occurs in a particular political context: following the arrest of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces at the start of the year, the Venezuelan government is led by interim President Delcy Rodríguez, although the details of the operation that facilitated the arrest were not disclosed by Patel.
The announcement had a revealing moment during the hearing: Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, mentioned nine captures, and it was the FBI director himself who corrected him to clarify that the number had already risen to ten, presenting the fact as one of the highlights of his tenure at the head of the agency.
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