During the morning of September 15th, 2025, the United States military carried out a second reported strike in the Caribbean Sea, striking a boat accused of transporting illegal narcotics from Venezuela. President Donald Trump confirmed the strike, announcing that three men were killed aboard the vessel. The incident allegedly occurred in international waters, although no additional information was found as to the exact location.

The strike was announced by U.S. President Donald Trump via his Truth Social account, where he wrote that U.S. forces had targeted “confirmed narco-terrorists from Venezuela… transporting illegal narcotics through international waters” and specifically referred to “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists”. During a White House news conference on the day of the strike, he further claimed that “bags of cocaine and fentanyl” were found “spattered all over the ocean,” when asked about proof that the vessel’s occupants were drug traffickers. However, no independent verification of a drug presence has been found via open sources, nor has the US Government provided additional visual evidence of these claims. Aerial footage of the attack shared on Trump’s Truth Social post show a boat floating stationary in the middle of the water which then erupts in an explosion which creates a large fireball and engulfs the vessel in flames. Two people were visible on the deck of the boat before the explosion and are no longer visible when the surveillance footage zooms into the enflamed boat.

The day after the strike, on September 16th, Trump told reporters that “We knocked off actually three boats, not two. But you saw two” – it is unclear whether this refers to a third strike which was undisclosed (and part of one of the first two strikes), or is in reference to a separate operation declared by the U.S. Coast Guard to board a Venezuelan vessel in Venezuelan waters.

On X/Twitter, @TenchuLuis quoted a source who told them that “the leader of Tren de Aragua, nicknamed El Tite” was killed in the attack on September 15th. However, no other sources confirmed the names of the victims. An X/Twitter post from @ReporteYa on September 19th shared an article from the Associated Press, which notes that the strike had “affected fishing communities” off the Venezuelan coast but no first hand testimonies or obituaries have surfaced from family members or local sources.

Some media outlets and political leaders contested the framing of the strike. Colombian President Gustavo Petro publicly described the action as “murder,” and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced the attack as a “diplomatic aggression,” warning that Venezuela retained its “legitimate right to defense.”

While U.S. sources have consistently described the deceased as “narcoterrorists” or “members of drug cartels,” no individual identification, affiliations, or visual confirmation of weaponry has been made public. A video shared by multiple social media accounts shows the destruction of a boat, but no bodies are visible in the footage. At the time of writing, no local sources have confirmed the point of origin of the boat. While U.S. officials attributed the vessel to Venezuelan drug cartels, the specific location of departure has not been independently verified.

Project Ploughshares published an investigation into the use of Canadian technology in the strikes by analyzing the drone footage posted by President Trump and concluded that “This footage displayed critical aspects of L3Harris WESCAM’s [based in Hamilton, Ontario] graphical user interface — the on-screen and often unique and proprietary text, symbols, and reticules visible in the feed of the sensor, which can be seen in both videos posted by President Trump [referring to the September 2nd, separately assessed in USCAR250902a, and September 15th strikes].” The investigation then pointed to “a light-blue scale bar used to measure the size and distance of visible objects, a trademark element of WESCAM’s MX-Series sensor interface” and “the crosshairs that mark the centre of the sensor feed, or “line-of-sight” reticle, match in both the footage of the September 2025 airstrikes” as evidence pointing to the Canadian technology but also clarified that they weren’t able to determine “whether the MX-Series sensors directly guided the airstrikes using a laser designator or were instead providing surveillance in coordination with other aircraft”.

On October 18th, over a month after the incident, Colombian news outlet @RTVCnoticias reported that the boat that had been bombed “around” September 16th (later referred to as the attack on September 15th but announced on September 16th) was Colombian and occurred in Colombian waters. The news outlet spoke with the family of a 40-year-old Colombian fisherman reportedly killed in the attack named Alejandro Carranza. Alejandro’s relative Audenis Manjarres told @RTVCnoticias that Alejandro was born into a fishing family from Santa Marta (referring to him as a “Samario”) and had departed from La Guajira at 5 a.m. to go fishing the morning before he was killed (September 14th). Based on the video footage published by the U.S. military, relatives pointed out that the men seem to be fixing the engines when the strike occurred because one of the engines was down and the other one was lifted, which is the universal sign that the boat was adrift and experiencing mechanical issues. The report included an image of the victim Alejandra smiling at the camera wearing a camo-printed Nike hat and a copy of his Colombian ID.

Colombian president Petro Gustavo reposted the article from @RTVCnoticias on Twitter/X, emphasizing that the victim had no ties to drug trafficking and that the boat clearly had a distress signal out when it was attacked. President Petro called on the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to initial legal proceedings in international courts and to protect the victims’ families. However, AFP reported that according to Colombian media, Alejandro had a criminal record for stealing weapons while working with a gang but was not able to verify this information when contacting local prosecutors.

Local journalists from Venezuela-News spoke with the father of Alejandro Carranza who described his son as “the right-hand man of the house for everyone. With him, we never lacked anything here.”

The New York Times published additional details about the victim Alejandro Carranza on November 13th after speaking with additional members of his family and friends. Alejandro’s 14-year-old daughter told the New York Times “I never thought I would lose my father in this way,” and Katerine Hernández, the mother of three of Mr. Carranza’s children, pointed out that contrary to Trump’s claim that the strike had killed “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela,” in reality “Alejandro had nothing to do with Venezuela; he spent his entire life here in Colombia.” Hernández also mentioned that while Alejandro sometimes took jobs piloting boats for others in the area, he had never been involved in drug smuggling, adding that “If he was some kind of narcoterrorist, then why are we living in misery instead of a mansion?” Alejandro’s 11-year-old son Libistron was also extremely distressed when another child showed him the video shared by Trump, which reportedly showed his father’s boat being blown up and his father being killed. A friend of Alejandro named Leonardo Vega who is a leader of a fisherman’s association in Santa Marta immediately associated the boat depicted as being blown up in the video as a fisherman’s boat because “the destroyed boat had two motors instead of the three or four used on boats typically used to smuggle drugs or other contraband.” Leonardo described Alejandro, nicknamed “Coroncoro” after a small local fish, as easygoing and added that he enjoyed drinking beer and playing pool.

On December 2nd, The Guardian and Politico reported that Alejandro’s family had filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of which the US is a member but has not ratified the enforcement treaty.

Methodological note about classification of those killed in this incident

In documenting this incident, Airwars is following the guidance outlined by independent International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law experts, whereby those on the vessels are understood to be civilians, given that the legal framework in which the strikes are being conducted remains in question.

Airwars has therefore included a civilian casualty count of three deaths.