WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. 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 Sunday.
Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers tosmuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressurethen-President Nicolás Madurobefore Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
The Defense Department said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III overnight, conducting "a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding."
"The vessel tried to defy President Trump's quarantine — hoping to slip away," the Pentagon said. "We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down."
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The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. troops boarding the tanker.
The Trump administration hasbeen seizing tankersas part of its broader effortsto take controlof the Venezuela's oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under U.S. control, and later told The Associated Press in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.
Last week, the U.S. militaryboarded a different tankerin the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decision-making.
