US military boards third oil tanker in Indian Ocean after tracking it from Caribbean

The Pentagon says U.S. military forces have boarded a third sanctioned oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking it from the Caribbean Sea

WASHINGTON -- 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.

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.”

Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying 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 Venezuela's then-President Nicolás Maduro before Maduro was apprehended in January during an American military operation.

The Bertha is a vessel flagged to the Cook Islands and is under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.