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The U.S. military said it attacked two ships it said were carrying drugs on Wednesday, killing five people on board.
U.S. Southern Command did not disclose the location of the latest attack, but for the past three months U.S. forces have been targeting ships they suspect of smuggling drugs into the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.
Wednesday’s attack came a day after the United States attacked what it called “three drug-trafficking ships,” killing at least three people.
The Trump administration views its operations as a non-international armed conflict with alleged traffickers, but legal experts say they may have violated laws governing such conflicts.
Since the first U.S. attack on a ship in international waters on September 2, there have been more than 30 attacks on ships as part of the Trump administration’s “war on drugs”, killing more than 110 people.
The first attack has drawn special attention from lawmakers in Washington since two U.S. military strikes targeted ships.
The two men who survived the first attack and clung to the hull were killed in the second.
Some lawmakers have expressed concern that “double-tap” attacks violate rules of engagement.
In its post announcing the Dec. 30 attack on the three-ship convoy, U.S. Southern Command said there were multiple survivors, but did not specify how many.
“The remaining narco-terrorists abandoned the other two boats, jumped overboard and kept their distance, then sank their respective vessels in subsequent engagements,” the report said.
It added that the U.S. Coast Guard had been “immediately notified” to search for survivors.
Reuters reported that a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters that a search was underway for eight survivors.
It’s unclear if any of them have been found.
The U.S. has provided no evidence that the ships it targeted were carrying drugs, but Southern Command again insisted in a recent post that “intelligence confirms that these ships are transiting and engaging in drug trafficking along known drug trafficking routes.”
