A strike carried out by US forces on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, which the White House says killed 11 alleged drug traffickers, however, legal experts have said that the attack may have violated international human rights and maritime law.
President Donald Trump announced that US forces destroyed a vessel which he said had departed from Venezuela. He told the Tren de Aragua cartel operated the boat and was carrying drugs bound for the US.
US defence officials have so far declined to offer details on the strike, footage of which Trump shared on Truth Social, including what legal authority they relied upon to justify it. BBC Verify reached out to a range of experts in international and maritime law, with several saying that the US may have acted illegally in attacking the vessel.
The US is not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Still, the US military’s legal advisors have previously said that the US should “act in a manner consistent with its provisions”.
Under the convention, countries agree not to interfere with vessels operating in international waters. There are limited exceptions to this, which allow a state to seize a ship, such as in the case of “hot pursuit” where a vessel is chased from a country’s waters into the high seas.
“Force can be used to stop a boat, but generally this should be non-lethal measures,” Prof Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast said. But he added that the use of aggressive tactics must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defence where there is an immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials”, noting that the US moves were likely “unlawful under the law of the sea”.
In Venezuela, President Maduro has yet to respond to the US strikes, but his Communications Minister Freddy Ñáñez has suggested that the footage released by the White House may have been generated using AI. In a post to X, he indicated that the water in the video “looks very stylised and unnatural”.
BBC Verify has run the clip through SynthID, Google’s AI detection software, and found no evidence that the footage is fake. The strikes come amid reports that the US has deployed several naval warships to the region in support of anti-narcotics operations against Venezuela.
We’ve not been able to track all of these vessels. However, using information from publicly available onboard trackers and videos on social media, we’ve potentially identified four of them in the region. A ship identifying itself as the USS Lake Erie – a guided missile cruiser – last transmitted its location in the Caribbean Sea on 30 August, east of the Panama Canal on 30 August.
Two others, identifying themselves as the USS Gravely and USS Jason Dunham, last transmitted their locations in mid-August, at the American base in Guantanamo Bay. A fourth, the USS Fort Lauderdale, transmitted its location north of the Dominican Republic on 28 August.
Trump – who has long sought to oust Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro – has authorised a US$50m reward for any information leading to his arrest. The Venezuelan leader claimed victory in last year’s elections, widely viewed as rigged by international observers.
