WASHINGTON — U.S. military forces boarded a third sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
An organization that tracks ship movements said the vessel was the only tanker left to pursue after more than a dozen fled the coast of Venezuela following the capture of the South American country's authoritarian then-president, Nicolás Maduro.
The boarding is the 10th interdiction of an oil tanker conducted by the Trump administration since it began targeting vessels connected to Venezuela in early December. The others were seized in the Caribbean or North Atlantic.
U.S. Southern Command said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Bertha overnight, conducting ''a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding."
''The vessel was operating in defiance of President Trump's established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean and attempted to evade,'' the post said. ''From the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, we tracked it and stopped it.''
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing operation, noted that as with the previous two boardings conducted in the Indian Ocean, the Bertha was not formally seized but rather placed under U.S. control. The official said the Bertha's fate will be determined by the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. Navy helicopters taking off from an identified ship and flying toward the tanker.
Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years and relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.
