(TNND) — The U.S. military has targeted another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean as part of its efforts to track down illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon announced on Sunday.
Venezuela has had U.S. sanctions placed on its oil for several years and has relied solely on shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude oil into global supply chains.
In December, President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers as a part of his plan to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro to step down prior to capturing and apprehending the Venezuelan leader in January during a U.S. military operation.
In the wake of the capturing of Maduro, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was raided Saturday night. In a social media post, the Department of War said that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea and conducted “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding.”
The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine — hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said. “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.
A video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. troops boarding the Veronica III.
According to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the ship is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under U.S. sanctions related to Iran.
The vessel fled Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day Maduro was captured by U.S. forced, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, according to a Sunday social media post from TankerTrackers.com.
Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organization said.
The Associated Press reports that co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, Samir Madani, told the outlet in January that his organization tracked the tankers using satellite imagery and surface-level photos, which revealed that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in violation of the quarantine.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon did not provide any further information regarding if the Veronica III had been previously seized and placed under U.S. control.
The recent raid comes as last week, the U.S. military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, named the Aquila II. The ship was held under U.S. control with its fate to be decided by American officials, according to a defense person who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
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