US military boards another oil tanker in Indian Ocean

Washington: US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday.

Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation. Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The Defence Department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “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.”

Video posted by the Pentagon shows US troops boarding the tanker. The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.agencies