U.S. army forces boarded one other sanctioned tanker within the Indian Ocean after monitoring the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to focus on illicit oil related to Venezuela, the Pentagon stated Sunday.
Venezuela had confronted U.S. sanctions on its oil for a number of years, counting on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into international provide chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to strain then-President Nicolás Maduro earlier than Maduro was apprehended in January throughout an American army operation.
A number of tankers fled the Venezuelan coast within the wake of the raid, together with the ship that was boarded within the Indian Ocean in a single day. The Protection Division stated in a publish on X that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon stated. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”
Video posted by the Pentagon reveals U.S. troops boarding the tanker.
The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel below U.S. sanctions associated to Iran, in line with the web site of the Treasury Division’s Workplace of Overseas Property Management.
The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the identical day as Maduro’s seize, with practically 2 million barrels of crude and gasoline oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.
“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the group stated.
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, advised The Related Press in January that his group used satellite tv for pc imagery and surface-level pictures to doc that no less than 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.
Final week, the U.S. army boarded a special tanker within the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held whereas its final destiny was determined by the USA, in line with a protection official who spoke final week on situation of anonymity to debate ongoing decision-making.
