US 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.
US Southern Command said in a post on X that US 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.”
Venezuela has 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 Venezuela’s then-President Nicols Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
The Bertha is a vessel flagged to the Cook Islands and is under US sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Video posted by the Pentagon shows US military helicopters flying toward the tanker.
Trump’s Republican administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon’s post did not state whether the Bertha was formally seized and placed under US control.
Maduro was brought to the US to face charges of working with drug cartels to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the US and has pleaded not guilty.
