None of the 11 people killed in a US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean last week were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s interior minister has said, while US media reported the attack came after the vessel had turned around and was heading back to shore.
The administration of Donald Trump has said the boat was transporting illegal narcotics, but has provided little further information about the incident, even amid demands from members of the US Congress for a justification for the action.
“They openly confessed to killing 11 people,” Venezuela’s interior minister and ruling party head, Diosdado Cabello, said on state television. “We have done our investigations here in our country and there are the families of the disappeared people who want their relatives, and when we asked in the towns, none were from Tren de Aragua, none were drug traffickers.
“A murder has been committed against a group of citizens using lethal force,” added Cabello, questioning how the US could determine whether drugs were on the boat and why the people were not instead arrested.
“How did they identify them as members of the Tren de Aragua? Did they have, I don’t know, a chip? Did they have a QR code and [the US military] read it from above in the dark?” Cabello said.
The Venezuelan government said after the incident that a video post by Trump of the strike was artificial intelligence.
US national security officials acknowledged during a closed briefing this week on Capitol Hill that the boat was fired on multiple times by the US military after it had changed course, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The emerging details came as several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, indicated dissatisfaction with the administration’s rationale and questioned the legality of the action. They view it as a potential overreach of executive authority in part by using the military for law enforcement purposes.
In a letter to the White House, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and two dozen other Democratic senators said the Trump administration has provided “no legitimate legal justification” for the strike.
“Our armed forces are not law enforcement agencies,” said Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a floor speech this week. “They are not empowered to hunt down suspected criminals and kill them without trial,” Reed said.
Reed said in his speech that the administration has offered “no proof that this vessel was engaged in an attack, or even that it was engaged in drug trafficking at the time.” He also said the administration has provided “no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel.”
Republican Senator Rand Raul has said it was unlikely the boat was headed to US shores, which would be a lengthy trip for such a vessel.
Paul – a libertarian-leaning Republican with a long history of challenging executive overreach, particularly in national security matters – has argued the US cannot simply kill people suspected of wrongdoing without due process.
In response, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said “These were evil Tren de Aragua narco-terrorists trying to bring illegal drugs into our country and kill Americans” and that the “president acted in line with the laws of armed conflict”.
Kelly also said Nicolás Maduro was not the legitimate president of Venezuela and that he was a “fugitive”.
The Pentagon added that drug cartels will find “no safe harbor.”
“This strike sent a clear message: If you traffic drugs toward our shores, the United States military will use every tool at our disposal to stop you cold,“ chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said.
The Trump administration has ratcheted up the US military presence in the southern Caribbean as part of what it says is a crackdown on drug smugglers, and ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter jets to a Puerto Rico airfield.
Maduro said early on Thursday his country would deploy military, police and civilian defenses at 284 “battlefront” locations across the country, his latest show of military capacity.
“We’re ready for an armed fight, if it’s necessary,” Maduro said from Ciudad Caribia, on the country’s central coast, in a broadcast on state television flanked by his defense minister.
“Along all the Venezuelan coasts, from the border with Colombia to the east of the country, from north to south and east to west, we have a full preparation of official troops,” he said.
Reuters witnesses in several cities around Venezuela did not note an increase in troop presence.
The US last month doubled its reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro to $50m over allegations of drug trafficking and links to criminal groups.
Maduro has always denied the accusations and his government says Venezuela is not a drug producer.
With Reuters and Associated Press
