US military kills four in latest strike on boat in the Caribbean

Four people died in a fourth deadly attack by the US military on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean, according to the Pentagon.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is facing new scrutiny over the strikes after it was revealed that a targeted boat had been struck twice during a September 2 attack.

According to experts, a similar attack might be a war crime.

The US Southern Command stated in a post on X that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, was responsible for the most recent strike.

According to the statement, the military “launched a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in a designated terrorist organization’s international waters.”

“The vessel was transiting along a well-known route for narcotics in the Eastern Pacific, according to information obtained from the intelligence team. The vessel’s four male narco-terrorists were killed, the statement read.

In the course of the campaign, the Trump administration has killed more than 80 alleged drug smugglers.

However, revelations made after the September 2 strike have prompted congressional bipartisan committees to conduct new investigations.

Following an initial strike, Hegseth did not order the second strike on the vessel, according to the White House. Instead, they claimed Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley was in charge of the second strike, which appeared to have killed two survivors of the first attack.

According to the White House, the second strike continued to be legal under the law of armed conflict. It is considered a war crime to target unarmed combatants, according to legal experts. It is prohibited to fire on shipwrecks, according to the military’s own manual.

Bradley gave a number of briefings held behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Thursday. He denied having been given the order to murder every passenger on board.

The briefings were described in conflicting ways by legislators.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated in an interview with The Associated Press that “Bradley was very clear that he was given no such order, to give no quarter or to kill them all.”

Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said, “The order was basically kill the 11 people on the boat.”

According to Smith, the survivors were “basically two shirtless people clinging to the bow of a capsized and inoperable boat, drifting in the water until the missiles come and kill them.”

Rights groups claimed that the strikes were equivalent to extrajudicial killings even before the September 2 double-strike attack was made public.

Alejandro Carranza’s family complained to a regional rights organization earlier this week that his right to life had been wrongfully killed in a US strike in September.

No use of force or declaration of war have been approved by Congress, despite the Trump administration’s description of the attack as part of a larger “war” against so-called “narco-terrorists.

The most recent attack comes as the US is bolstering its military forces close to Venezuela’s coast, with Trump repeatedly warning that land attacks could occur “very soon.”