Pentagon announces it has killed four men in another boat strike in Pacific

The Pentagon announced on Thursday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.

Video of the new strike was posted on social media by the US southern command, based in Florida, with a statement saying that, at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.

“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement added.

The latest strike comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers with military strikes, with US lawmakers promising to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.

Hegseth has faced increasing scrutiny over the 2 September strike following a report from the Washington Post that the defense secretary had directed the military to “kill them all”. The US admiral who commanded the attack told lawmakers on Thursday that there was no such order. Still, Democrat Jim Himes described the footage of the September strike “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service”.

The administration has argued the US is at war with drug traffickers and that such strikes are legal under the rules of war, but most legal experts reject that rationale.

More details soon …