American troops board another oil tanker after following it from the Caribbean
Washington – American soldiers boarded another approved tank in the Indian Ocean after tracking a vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illegal oil linked to Venezuela, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
Venezuela has faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadowy fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude through global chains. President Trump ordered the quarantine condemned tanks in December to suppress former President Nicolás Maduro earlier Maduro was arrested in January during the American military campaign.
Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast after the attack, including a tanker in the Indian Ocean. The Department of Defense said in the X post that the US military boarded the Veronica III, performing “right of visitation, maritime interdiction and embarkation.”
“The ship attempted to evade President Trump’s quarantine — hoping he would escape,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, closed it.”
A video posted on social media by the Pentagon shows US soldiers boarding the ship:
The Veronica III is a Panamanian flagged vessel subject to US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The Panama Maritime Authority said on Sunday in a brief statement that the ship is no longer registered there and has been canceled in December 2024.
The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, on the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude oil and gasoline, TankerTrackers.com posted on Sunday in X.
“Since 2023, he has been dealing with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the agency said.
Samir Madani, the founder of TankerTrackers.com, told the Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite images and high-resolution images to document that at least 16 tankers had left the Venezuelan coast in violation of the quarantine.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to control Venezuelan oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III had been officially seized and placed under US control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no further information to provide beyond that post.
Last week, the US military boarded a different submarine in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its fate was being decided by the United States, according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing decisions.
