WASHINGTON (AP) — 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.
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 boarding is the tenth interdiction of an oil tanker conducted by the Trump administration since they began the practice in early December. It is also the third tanker to be seized in the Indian Ocean instead of the Caribbean or North Atlantic.
"The vessel was operating in defiance of President Trump's established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean and attempted to evade," Southern Command's 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 like 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 that the Bertha's fate will be determined by agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. Navy military helicopters taking off from an identified ship and flying toward the tanker.
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Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers tosmuggle crude into global supply chains. President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure Maduro before he was apprehended in January during an American military operation.
The Bertha is a vessel that was flagged to the Cook Islands when it was placed under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. However, the vessel was more recently listed under a false flag of the Caribbean island of Curacao and managed by a company in China, according to Equasis, a shipping information system.
Following Maduro's capture, at least 16 tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, who said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document the ships' movements.
The Bertha was the only tanker left to pursue from the original 16, TankerTrackers.com said in a Feb. 15 post on X. Madani said in a message to The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Bertha was laden with 1.9 million barrels of crude oil.
Over the past few years, the ship has received Iranian crude from other vessels via hoses for deliveries to China, Madani said.
Trump's Republican administration has beenseizing tankersas part of its broader efforts totake control of Venezuela's oil. The Pentagon's post did not state whether the Bertha was formally seized and placed under U.S. control. The Pentagon said in an email that it didn't have more to add beyond Southern Command's post on X.
Maduro wasbrought to the U.S. to face chargesof working with drug cartels to facilitate the shipment ofthousands of tons of cocaineinto the U.S. and has pleaded not guilty.