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The United States military killed 11 people on Tuesday (Sep 2) in a strike on a vessel from Venezuela allegedly carrying illegal narcotics, President Donald Trump said, in the first known operation since his administration's recent deployment of warships to the southern Caribbean.
Trump told reporters at the White House: "We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat."
US Southern Command did not say where it had carried out the latest strikes but US forces have been targeting vessels they suspect of smuggling narcotics to the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific for the past three months.
Wednesday's strike came a day after the US targeted what it said were "three narco-trafficking vessels travelling as a convoy", killing at least three people.
The Trump administration has cast its operations as a non-international armed conflict with the alleged traffickers but legal experts say they could be in violation of the laws governing such conflict.
In total, there have been more than 30 strikes on vessels as part of the Trump administration's "war on drugs" with more than 110 people killed since the US carried out its first attack on a boat in international waters on 2 September.
That first attack has come under particular scrutiny from lawmakers in Washington since it emerged that US forces struck the targeted boat twice.
Two people who had survived the first strike and were clinging to the hull of their boat were killed in the second.
Some lawmakers expressed