Washington– The Pentagon announced Sunday that US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it in the Caribbean Sea in an attempt to target illicit oil linked to Venezuela.
Venezuela has faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, and has relied on a shadow fleet of tankers carrying false flags. Smuggling crude oil into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered quarantines on sanctioned tankers in December to apply pressure Then-president Nicolas Maduro Before Maduro was arrested in January during a US military operation.
Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast following the raid, including a ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Department of Defense said in a post on the
“The ship attempted to defy President Trump’s quarantine, hoping to escape,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and closed it.”
A video clip published by the Pentagon shows American forces boarding the tanker.
The Veronica 3 is a Panama-flagged ship subject to US sanctions related to Iran, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control website. The Panama Maritime Authority said on Sunday in a brief statement that the ship was no longer registered there and had been canceled in December 2024.
The Veronica 3 left Venezuela on January 3, the same day Maduro was arrested, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude oil and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com reported Sunday on X.
The organization said: “Since 2023, it has been involved in Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil.”
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite and land surface images to document at least 16 tankers leaving the Venezuelan coast in violation of quarantine.
The Trump administration has The tankers were captured As part of its broader efforts To control From Venezuelan oil. The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III had been formally captured and placed under U.S. control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond this post.
Last week, U.S. Army Board a different carrier In the Indian Ocean, Aquila II. The ship was being held while the United States decided its final fate, according to a defense official who spoke last week on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing decision-making process.
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Associated Press writers Konstantin Torobin in Washington and Alma Solis in Panama City contributed to this report.