US forces board second Venezuela‑linked oil tanker in Indian Ocean

US military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said on Sunday.Venezuela had 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. Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure the president, Nicolás Maduro, before Maduro was apprehended in January during a US military operation.Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast after 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”.The Pentagon said: “The vessel tried to defy President Trump’s quarantine – hoping to slip away,. We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down.” Dense, sticky and heavy: why Venezuela’s oil is valuable to Trump – video explainerVideo posted by the Pentagon showed 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 Veronica III left Venezuela on 3 January, the same day as Maduro’s capture, with nearly 2m barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted on Sunday on X.“Since 2023, she’s been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil,” the organisation said.Samir Madani, the co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, told the Associated Press in January that his organisation used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil. The Pentagon did not say whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under US control. It told the AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond its post.Last week, the US military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II. The ship was being held while its fate was decided by the US, according to a defence official who spoke last week.