The U.S. military announced Friday it had carried out a “lethal kinetic strike” on an alleged drug boat and said there was one person who survived the attack.
“On Jan. 23, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” U.S. Southern Command said in a post on X with a video that it said showed the strike, which is believed to be the first such attack in weeks.
The post did not say where specifically the boat was coming from or where it was bound, but said that “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.”
“Two narco-terrorists were killed and one survived the strike,” the post said. Following the attack, Southern Command said, it “immediately notified” the Coast Guard “to activate the Search and Rescue system for the survivor.”
No further details were immediately released. U.S. officials have not provided evidence supporting its allegations about the boat, its passengers, cargo or the number of people who survived or were killed.
The military has been conducting such strikes since September. The Defense Department has identified some of the vessels that were previously hit as having come from Venezuela.
The Friday strike is the first to be announced publicly since the Jan. 3 capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on a narco-terrorism conspiracy charge.
Maduro has pleaded not guilty.
In a Sept. 2 incident, the military carried out a second strike on what it said was a boat carrying drugs from Venezuela after the first strike failed to kill all of its occupants.
Legal experts have said that if the second strike was ordered to kill people who would be otherwise incapacitated, that could be a war crime.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley saw the survivors of the strike as legitimate military targets, a defense official told NBC News last month.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters during a December Cabinet meeting that Bradley “made the correct decision” and “we have his back.”
According to official estimates from the Pentagon, U.S. forces have conducted at least 35 strikes prior to Friday that have killed 114 people so far.
