The oil tanker seized by the United States off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery and photographs.
U.S. officials did not publicly name the vessel, but one official told The Times that it was a ship called the Skipper. Although the vessel’s location transponder indicated that it was anchored in the Atlantic Ocean near Guyana and Suriname, The Times found that from late October to at least Dec. 4, the ship was actually hundreds of miles away off Venezuela.
A satellite image captured on Nov. 18 shows the tanker docked at the country’s José oil terminal while its transponder showed that it was elsewhere.
The ship’s location was further corroborated by a photograph taken from land as it loaded oil. The image was provided by TankerTrackers.com, a company that monitors global oil shipping.
In the image, the ship sits low in the water, suggesting that it was weighed down after taking on a significant amount of cargo — about 1.8 or 1.9 million barrels of oil, according to TankerTrackers.com.
On Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted a video of the purported seizure operation on social media. The footage, which The Times could not independently verify, shows helicopters hovering over the tanker as armed people in camouflage rappel onto the ship’s deck.
Data provided by TankerTrackers.com suggests that the ship has frequently carried oil from countries under U.S. sanctions. The vessel’s tracking data shows multiple trips to Iran and Venezuela over the last two years.
“Skipper has transported nearly 13 million barrels of Iranian and Venezuelan oil since joining the global dark fleet of tankers in 2021,” said Samir Madani, the co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, referring to ships that obscure their true locations. The ship delivered Iranian oil to Syria in 2024 when it was under the control of Bashar al-Assad, helping his government prolong a civil war, Mr. Madani said.
From February to July this year, the ship transported nearly two million barrels of crude oil from Iran to China.
The ship, under a previous name, was placed under sanctions in 2022 by the U.S. Treasury Department, which said the vessel was part of “an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue” to support the Iranian-backed forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force.
Additional satellite imagery analysis was provided by Christoph Koettl.
Christiaan Triebert is a Times reporter working on the Visual Investigations team, a group that combines traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and analysis of visual evidence to verify and source facts from around the world.
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