The US military's Southern Command has confirmed that two suspected drug smugglers were killed in a strike on a boat in the eastern Pacific on Monday. The operation, which also left one survivor being searched for by the US Coast Guard, was carried out under the direction of the newly appointed commander, General Francis L Donovan.
The Pentagon described the vessel as travelling along known narco-trafficking routes. According to a tally by The Intercept, the latest killings bring the death toll to at least 130 in 38 such strikes. Legal experts have previously criticised these actions as extrajudicial.
In a separate incident on the same day, US military forces boarded a sanctioned tanker, the Aquila II, in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean. The operation is part of an oil quarantine aimed at squeezing Venezuela, said Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who vowed to capture all fleeing ships. 'None of those are getting away,' he told shipyard workers in Maine.
The Aquila II, a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions for shipping illicit Russian oil, had been running dark—with its radio transponder off—for much of the past year. Owned by a company with a Hong Kong address, the tanker is currently being held while its fate is decided. The Pentagon stated the ship 'ran, and we followed.'
Naval assets involved in the operation included the destroyers USS Pinckney and USS John Finn, as well as the mobile base ship USS Miguel Keith. The Trump administration has so far seized seven tankers as part of broader efforts to control Venezuela's oil exports.
