Washington, DC: Another ‘sanctioned’ tanker, suspected to be carrying Venezualan oil, was boarded by US forces in the Indian Ocean region, the Pentagon said on Sunday.
The vessel was being tracked from the Carribbean Sea, officials said.
For several years now, Venezuela has faced US sanctions on its oil. The country was accused of relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. US president Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to exert pressure on former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. This was before Maduro’s capture in January.
Reports have claimed that several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight. The defense department said in a post on X that US forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting “a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding”, as reported by Republic TV.
“The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine – hoping to slip away,” the Pentagon said, adding: “We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.”
A 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 Panama Maritime Authority said Sunday in a brief statement that the ship was no longer registered there and had been canceled in December 2024.
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.
“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organization said.
Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.
The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under US control, and later told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.
US forces had boarded another tanker, the Aquila II, in the Indian Ocean last week.
