"The plan was foiled by guards who caused the drones to explode prematurely, the attacker says. The cell phone signal blockers that protect the president suddenly came back on, causing the blasts.
The Venezuelan government's account of the attack, provided by the interior minister, confirms parts of their story, including the drones' flight paths.
The attack was prepared on a rented farm in rural Colombia. Weeks before Maduro's speech, the Venezuelan defectors had ordered commercially available drones online from the United States, and customized them to detonate a homemade bomb through the remote control app.
In the videos the defector provided to CNN, you can hear men complaining that the drones' screws are too tiny. It's hard to read the Chinese lettering on the boxes, one says.
Videos also show the group practicing the tricky bit: flying the drones high enough to avoid detection, and then swooping down at a steep angle to strike their target. They practice in different scenarios: amid green hills over a swimming pool, launched out of a car window, under cover of night. One drone would be later blown up in a test.
Later, they dismantle the machines to be smuggled across the border into Venezuela. Once back in their homeland, they would slowly rebuild the two drones destined for the president.