Officials say rescuers searching for lone survivor after latest attack on what Pentagon says are suspected drug smugglers

The US military’s Southern Command, which oversee operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced that it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.

The statement said that the latest in what legal experts have called a series of extrajudicial killings by the Pentagon was carried out “at the direction of” the Florida-based combat unit’s new commander, Gen Francis L Donovan, who was sworn in at a Pentagon ceremony last Thursday. Donovan takes over after a US navy admiral, Alvin Holsey, chose to retire over reported disagreements over the boat-strike policy.

The announcement, which was accompanied by video of the attack, was carried out on a boat “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific”, the Pentagon said. The US Coast Guard was called to search for a lone survivor of the attack, the statement said.

The new killings bring the death toll to at least 130 in 38 strikes, according to Pentagon statements tallied by the Intercept.

Earlier Monday, US military forces boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the ship from the Caribbean Sea as part of an oil quarantine meant to squeeze Venezuela, said defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

Venezuela had faced US sanctions on its oil and relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. Following the US raid to apprehend then president Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight.

Hegseth vowed to eventually capture all those ships, telling a group of shipyard workers in Maine on Monday that “the only guidance I gave to my military commanders is none of those are getting away”.

“I don’t care if we got to go around the globe to get them; we’re going to get them,” he added.

The Trump administration has seized seven tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. Aquila II, a Panamanian-flagged tanker under US sanctions related to the shipment of illicit Russian oil, has not been formally seized and placed under US control unlike previous actions, a defense official said.

Instead, the ship is being held while its ultimate fate is decided by the US, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss decision-making.

The Aquila II is owned by a company with a listed address in Hong Kong, ship tracking data shows it has spent much of the last year with its radio transponder turned off, a practice known as “running dark” commonly employed by smugglers to hide their location .

It was one of at least 16 tankers that fled the Venezuelan coast last month, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, who said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document the ship’s movements. According to data transmitted from the ship Monday, it is not currently laden with a cargo of crude oil.

The Pentagon’s post on X said the military “conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction” on the ship.

“The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean,” the Pentagon said. “It ran, and we followed.”

A navy official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss military operations, would not say what forces were used in the operation but confirmed the destroyers USS Pinckney and USS John Finn as well as the mobile base ship USS Miguel Keith were operating in the Indian Ocean.

In videos the Pentagon posted to social media, uniformed forces can be seen boarding a navy helicopter that takes off from a ship that matches the profile of the Miguel Keith. Video and photos of the tanker shot from inside a helicopter also show a navy destroyer sailing alongside the ship.

Associated Press contributed to this report