US military personnel boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the ship from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to combat illicit oil linked to Venezuela, the Pentagon said, the Associated Press reported.
Venezuela has been under US sanctions over its oil for several years, relying on a shadowy fleet of false-flag tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered the quarantine of the sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolas Maduro before Maduro was detained in January in a U.S. military operation.
Several tankers left the Venezuelan coast after the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The War Department said in an article in "Ex" that U.S. forces boarded the "Veronica III", carrying out "visitation, maritime interdiction and boarding".
"The ship attempted to violate President Trump's quarantine, hoping to escape. "We tracked it from the Caribbean Sea to the Indian Ocean, closed the gap and stopped it," the Pentagon said.
A video released by the Pentagon shows US soldiers boarding the tanker.
The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel that is subject to US sanctions over Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.
The ship left Venezuela on January 3, the same day Maduro was captured, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude oil and fuel, TankerTrackers.com reported on Sunday in "Ex". "Since 2023, the ship has been linked to Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil," the organization said.
The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of a broader effort to take control of Venezuela's oil. The Pentagon did not say in the release whether the "Veronica III" had been formally seized and placed under U.S. control, and later said in an email to the AP that it had no further information.