US military boards another oil tanker
U.S. military forces boarded a third sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
An organization that tracks ship movements said the vessel was the only tanker left to pursue after more than a dozen fled the coast of Venezuela following the capture of the South American country’s authoritarian then-president, Nicolas Maduro.
The boarding is the 10th interdiction of an oil tanker conducted by the Trump administration since it began targeting vessels connected to Venezuela in early December. The others were seized in the Caribbean or North Atlantic.
U.S. Southern Command said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Bertha overnight, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
