US military forces boarded a sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after monitoring the ship from the Caribbean Sea, the Pentagon mentioned Monday.
The Pentagon’s assertion on social media didn’t say whether or not the ship was related to Venezuela, which faces US sanctions on its oil and has relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into international provide chains.
However, the Aquila II was one in all no less than 16 tankers that departed the Venezuelan coast final month after US forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro, mentioned Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com. He mentioned his group used satellite tv for pc imagery and surface-level images to doc the ship’s actions.
According to information transmitted from the ship on Monday, it isn’t at the moment laden with a cargo of crude oil.
The Aquila II is a Panamanian-flagged tanker beneath US sanctions associated to the cargo of illicit Russian oil. Owned by an organization with a listed tackle in Hong Kong, ship monitoring information exhibits it has spent a lot of the final yr with its radio transponder turned off, a follow referred to as “running dark” generally employed by smugglers to cover their location.
US Southern Command, which oversees Latin America, mentioned in an electronic mail that it had nothing so as to add to the Pentagon’s put up on X. The put up mentioned the military “conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction” on the ship.
“The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean,” the Pentagon mentioned. “It ran, and we followed.”
The US didn’t say it had seized the ship, which the US has finished beforehand with at least seven other sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela.
Since the US ouster of Maduro in a shock nighttime raid on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has got down to management the manufacturing, refining and international distribution of Venezuela’s oil merchandise. Officials in President Donald Trump’s Republican administration have made it clear they see seizing the tankers as a strategy to generate money as they search to rebuild Venezuela’s battered oil business and restore its economic system.