WASHINGTON: US forces boarded and seized an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean that violated President Donald Trump’s blockade of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean and fled the region, the Pentagon said Monday.
The Pentagon told AFP that US forces had seized the ship, after announcing on X that the Aquila II was boarded “without incident” overnight.
The tanker “was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean. It ran, and we followed,” the Pentagon said on X, adding that the vessel was “tracked and hunted” from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.
The post included a video of US forces boarding a helicopter and then roping down onto the deck of a tanker ship.
The ship is the eighth seized by the United States since Trump in December ordered a “blockade” of sanctioned oil vessels heading to and from Venezuela.
And it is the second to lead US forces on a chase outside the region, after a Russia-linked tanker was apprehended in the North Atlantic last month after being pursued by the United States from off the coast of Venezuela.
Washington has deployed a huge naval force in the Caribbean, striking boats it says were used for drug trafficking, seizing tankers and carrying out a stunning operation to seize Venezuela’s leftist leader Nicolas Maduro.
But the ships seized in recent months make up only a tiny fraction of the total number of sanctioned “dark fleet” vessels operating worldwide, which a senior US Coast Guard officer said number up to 800. “It’s a very small percentage” of vessels that have been seized, Rear Admiral David Barata told a congressional hearing earlier this month.
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