WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — The U.S. military on Wednesday struck one more suspected drug-trafficking vessel in international waters in the eastern Pacific, killing all three people aboard, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday night.
“Today … the Department of War carried out yet another lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO).
Yet again, the now-deceased terrorists were engaged in narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Hegseth again accused the vessel of carrying narcotics, saying it was traveling along a known narco-trafficking transit route. “These strikes will continue, day after day.
These are not simply drug runners — these are narco-terrorists bringing death and destruction to our cities … We will find them and kill them, until the threat to the American people is extinguished,” he said.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro slammed the U.S. strike as “murder”. “The attack on another boat in the Pacific, we don’t know if it’s Ecuadorean or Colombian, left some dead,” Petro wrote on X. “It is still murder.
Whether in the Caribbean or Pacific, the U.S. government strategy violates the norms of international law.” Colombia’s Foreign Ministry said in a separate statement that the United States must halt the attacks.
The U.S. military previously carried out seven such operations in the Caribbean Sea from September, mainly against boats accused of trafficking drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
The total death toll has risen to at least 37, including the deaths in the latest two strikes in the eastern Pacific, reportedly near Colombia’s Pacific coast. (Xinhua)
