US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure the president, Nicolás Maduro, before Maduro was apprehended in January during a US military operation.
US military says it seized another Venezuela-linked oil tanker
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Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast after the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The defense department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding”.
The Pentagon said: “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.”
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