US forces board oil tanker in Indian Ocean 

WASHINGTON — US military forces boarded an oil tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the ship from the Caribbean Sea, the Pentagon said in a social media post on Monday.According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon statement did not say whether the ship was connected to Venezuela, which faces US sanctions on its oil and has relied on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.However, the Aquila II was one of at least 16 tankers that departed the Venezuelan coast last month after US forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro, said Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com. He said his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document the ship’s movements.The Aquila II is a Panamanian-flagged tanker under US sanctions related to the shipment of illicit Russian oil. Owned by a company with a listed address in Hong Kong, ship tracking data shows it has spent much of the last year with its radio transponder turned off, a practice known as “running dark” commonly employed by smugglers to hide their location.US Southern Command, which oversees Latin America, said in an email that it had nothing to add to the Pentagon’s post on X. The post said the military “conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction” on the ship.“The Aquila II was operating in defiance of President Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean,” the Pentagon said. “It ran, and we followed.”The US did not say it had seized the ship, which the US has done previously with at least seven other sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela. — Agencies