A strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean killed four people on Thursday, the US military said, amid a growing controversy over a campaign that has taken more than 87 lives.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump’s administration have especially come under fire over an incident in early September in which US forces targeted the wreckage of a vessel that had already been hit, killing two survivors.
A senior Democratic lawmaker who saw footage of that incident on Thursday said it showed a US attack on “shipwrecked sailors,” while others have described it as a possible war crime.
The latest strike targeted a “vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific,” US Southern Command said in a post on X.
“Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” said the post, which included a video showing a multi-engine boat speeding across the water before being hit by a blast that left the vessel engulfed in flames.
Earlier in the day, lawmakers attended a classified briefing on Capitol Hill in which they were shown extended video footage of the strike, only a brief part of which has been publicly released.
The footage showed “the United States military attacking shipwrecked sailors — bad guys, bad guys — but attacking shipwrecked sailors,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told journalists.
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