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.
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.
President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure Maduro before he was apprehended in early January during a U.S. military operation. The seizing of the tankers is part of the Republican administration's broader efforts to take control of Venezuela’s oil.
The Bertha 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 Merey 16 crude, which is a grade of Venezuelan oil.
Over the past few years, the ship has received Iranian crude from other vessels via hoses for deliveries to China, Madani said.
The Pentagon said in an email that it didn’t have more to add beyond Southern Command’s post on X.
Maduro was brought to the U.S. to face charges of working with drug cartels to facilitate the shipment of thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. and has pleaded not guilty.
