President Donald Trump says two surviving “narcoterrorists” from a semi-submersible vessel destroyed by the US military in the Caribbean will be sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.
“It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.
He said that US intelligence has confirmed the vessel was carrying fentanyl and other narcotics.
The vessel was targeted on Thursday in what Trump described as a strike aimed at disrupting a major drug trafficking route.
Two crew members were killed, he said, while two others survived and were airlifted by US forces in a helicopter rescue operation to a nearby US Navy warship.
The US military held the survivors on board at least until Friday evening.
The press office for Ecuador’s government said it was not aware of the plans for repatriation. There was no immediate comment from Colombian authorities.
At least six vessels, most of them speedboats, have been targeted by US strikes in the Caribbean since September, with Venezuela alleged to be the origin of some of them.
Washington says its campaign is dealing a decisive blow to drug trafficking, but it has provided no evidence that the people killed were drug smugglers.
With Trump’s confirmation of the death toll on his Truth Social platform, that means US military actions against vessels in the region have killed at least 29 people.
The president has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He is relying on the same legal authority used by the administration of former President George W Bush when it declared a war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks on the US. This includes the ability to capture and detain combatants and use lethal force to take out their leadership. Trump is also treating the suspected traffickers as if they were enemy soldiers in a traditional war.
Previous similar strikes have raised concerns from Democratic lawmakers and legal experts who argue that such operations may exceed accepted wartime authority and risk violating international law.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Trump said the latest targeted vessel had been “built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs”.
US military buildup
The mission comes amid a sharp US military buildup across the Caribbean, involving guided missile destroyers, F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear-powered submarine and about 6,500 troops. The escalation has fuelled accusations that Washington is inching towards direct confrontation with Venezuela.
On Wednesday, Trump confirmed that he had authorised the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela, intensifying fears in Caracas that the US is attempting to topple President Nicolas Maduro.
Maduro has repeatedly denied involvement in drug trafficking and accused Washington of fabricating a narco-terrorism narrative as a pretext for trying to change the government. He condemned the recent maritime strikes as “a violation of Venezuela’s sovereignty and international law”.
Venezuela’s ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, has formally requested the UN Security Council to issue a determination that the US strikes are illegal and to reaffirm Venezuela’s sovereign rights.
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