US military forces have boarded another sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean Sea, the Pentagon has said. The vessel, the Veronica III, is Panamanian-flagged and subject to US sanctions related to Iran, according to the Treasury department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The Pentagon said in a post on X that the boarding was conducted under a "right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding" operation. Video released by the department showed US troops on the tanker. The post added: "The vessel tried to defy President Trump's quarantine – hoping to slip away. We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down."
The Veronica III left Venezuela on 3 January, the same day President Nicolás Maduro was captured during a US military operation, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, according to TankerTrackers.com. The monitoring organisation said the vessel had been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil since 2023.
The US has been targeting a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers that have helped Venezuela circumvent sanctions. Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, has said at least 16 tankers fled the Venezuelan coast after Maduro's capture. Last week, US forces boarded another tanker, the Aquila II, in the Indian Ocean. The Pentagon did not confirm whether the Veronica III had been formally seized and placed under US control.
