The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Announced It carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.
The latest in what legal experts call a series of extrajudicial killings by the Pentagon was carried out “at the behest” of the Florida-based combat division’s new commander, Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the statement said. Sworn At a Pentagon ceremony last Thursday. Donovan took over after the US Navy admiral, Alvin Holsey, retired over reported disagreements over boat-strike policy.
The announcement, accompanied by a video of the raid, was carried out on a boat “traveling through known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific,” the Pentagon said. The US Coast Guard was called to search for the lone survivor of the attack, the statement said.
The new killings brought the death toll from 38 attacks to at least 130, according to Pentagon statements. Calculated by the intercept.
Earlier Monday, US military Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the forces boarded the sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea as part of an oil embargo aimed at cracking down on Venezuela.
Venezuela faces US sanctions on its oil and relies on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. Following a US raid to capture then-President Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including a ship that ran aground in the Indian Ocean overnight.
Hegseth vowed to eventually seize all of those ships, telling a group of shipyard workers in Maine on Monday that “the only guidance I’ve given my military commanders is that none of them are getting out.”
“I don’t care if we go around the world to get them; we’re going to get them,” he added.
The Trump administration Venezuela has seized seven tankers as part of a broader effort to seize control of oil. Aquila II, a Panamanian-flagged tanker under US sanctions for illegal Russian oil shipments, has not been formally seized and placed under US control, unlike previous actions, a defense official said.
Instead, the US will decide the ship’s ultimate fate, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the decision-making.
The Aquila II belongs to a company with an address listed in Hong Kong, and ship tracking data shows it has spent much of the past year with its radio transponder turned off, commonly known by smugglers as “running dark” to hide their location.
It was one of at least 16 tankers that ran off the coast of Venezuela last month, according to TankerTrackers.com co-founder Samir Madani, who said his company used satellite images and surface-level photos to document the vessel’s movements. According to information transmitted from the vessel on Monday, it currently has no cargo of crude oil.
The Pentagon’s post on the X said the military “conducted a right-of-visit, maritime embargo” on the ship.
“The Aquila II is operating in the Caribbean in defiance of the sanctioned vessel quarantine established by President Trump,” the Pentagon said. “It ran, and we followed.”
A Navy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations, did not say which forces were used in the operation, but confirmed that the destroyers USS Pinckney and USS John Finn as well as the mobile base ship USS Miguel Keith were operating in the Indian Ocean.
In videos posted by the Pentagon on social media, uniformed forces can be seen boarding a Navy helicopter that takes off from a ship matching the profile of Miguel Keith. Video and photos taken of the tanker from inside a helicopter also show a naval destroyer traveling alongside the ship.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
