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The US military has boarded another Venezuela-linked tanker after tracking the ship from the Caribbean Sea, as part of an oil quarantine meant to squeeze Caracas.
Venezuela has faced US sanctions on its oil and been accused by Washington of relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.
Following the US raid to apprehend then-President Nicolás Maduro in early January, several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast, including Aquila II, the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean in the early hours of Monday.
“US military forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding on the Aquila II without incident,” the Department of Defence said on Monday in a post on X.
“The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean,” it added. “It ran, and we followed.”
The US did not say whether the tanker was directly linked to Venezuela. However, Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, said the Aquila II was one of at least 16 tankers that left the Venezuelan coast last month, shortly after the capture of Maduro.
According to data transmitted from the ship on Monday, it is not currently laden with a cargo of crude oil.
The Aquila II is a Panamanian-flagged tanker under US sanctions related to the shipment of illicit Russian oil. Owned by a firm with a listed address in Hong Kong, ship tracking data shows it has spent much of the last year with its radio transponder turned off, a practice known as “running dark” commonly used by smugglers to hide their location.
The Trump administration has seized seven tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the South American country’s oil. Unlike those previous actions, the Aquila II has not been formally seized and placed under US control, a government official said.
Since the US ouster of Maduro in a surprise nighttime raid on 3 January, the Trump administration has set out to control the production, refining and global distribution of Venezuela’s petroleum products.
US officials have made it clear they see seizing the tankers as a way to generate cash as they seek to rebuild Venezuela’s battered oil industry and restore its economy.