Washington, Sep 2 (EFE).- United States President Donald Trump said Tuesday that the US military “just over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat” off the coast of Venezuela.
“It just happened moments ago, and our great general, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (…) he gave us a little bit of a briefing, and you’ll see, and there’s more where that came from,” he added during a speech in the Oval Office.
“We have a lot of drugs pouring into our country, coming in for a long time, and we just these came out of Venezuela, and coming out, very heavily from Venezuela,” he concluded.
Trump praised the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Carney, who had notified him of the attack on the alleged Venezuelan vessel.
The military operation was confirmed shortly afterwards by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“Today, the US military conducted a lethal strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organisation,” Rubio wrote on X.
The US has deployed eight military ships carrying missiles and a nuclear-powered submarine to areas of the Caribbean Sea near the Venezuelan coast to combat drug trafficking.
In response, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro warned on Monday that his country faces the “greatest threat ever seen in the Americas in the last hundred years” and said that his nation would declare itself “in arms” if attacked. EFE
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