US says it killed four in new Caribbean strike on alleged drug vessel
US Southern Command says a strike on Sunday killed four people aboard a go-fast vessel in the Caribbean, the latest in a campaign that has killed more than 220 people since September 2025.
The United States military says it has killed four people in a strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that it alleged was involved in drug trafficking.
US Southern Command said on Sunday it had “executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean”, citing what it called “confirmed intelligence” of the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. It gave no further details and called the four dead “narco-terrorists”.
President Donald Trump’s administration says the vessels it has struck since September 2025 were transporting narcotics. US strikes on such boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific have killed more than 220 people.
The legality of the campaign is fiercely disputed. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and independent UN experts have called the strikes unlawful extrajudicial killings. Ben Saul, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, has said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the attacks “constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law”.
The American Civil Liberties Union has dismissed the administration’s claims about its targets as “unsubstantiated, fear-mongering claims”. The military provided no details beyond its claim of “confirmed intelligence”.
Sources
More on this topic: all World stories
