The Pentagon did not say why the ship was boarded.
U.S. military forces boarded a crude oil tanker “without incident” overnight in the Indian Ocean after pursuing it from the Caribbean, the Pentagon said on Feb. 9, accusing the vessel of breaching a U.S.-enforced quarantine.
The Department of War said in a post on X that “military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II” in the Indian Ocean after tracking it in response to the Trump administration’s “established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean.”
“It ran, and we followed. The Department of War tracked and hunted this vessel from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean. No other nation on planet Earth has the capability to enforce its will through any domain,” the department said.
After capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a military raid last month in Caracas, the United States has escalated a blockade on vessels traveling to and from the South American country, which has some of the largest oil reserves in the world.
The Pentagon’s statement, which was reposted by War Secretary Pete Hegseth on X, did not say whether the ship was connected to Venezuela, which faces U.S. sanctions on its oil and relies on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.
The U.S. military did not say why it had boarded the ship, which it has done previously with at least seven other sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela. The Epoch Times contacted the Department of War for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.
The tanker, Aquila II, which is flying a Panama flag, was sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January, with the department linking the ship to Russia’s energy sector.
Since the ouster of Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid on Jan. 3, the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to control the production, refining, and global distribution of Venezuela’s oil products.
The administration has also been trying to restrict the flow of oil to Cuba, which faces strict economic sanctions by the United States and relies heavily on oil shipments from allies such as Mexico, Russia, and Venezuela.
