One person survived and two were killed, the military said, who were turned over to Costa Rican coast guard
US Southern Command announced on Friday that US forces carried out another “lethal kinetic strike” on a suspected drug-smuggling boat in the eastern Pacific which left one survivor and two people dead.
After the strike, the military said that it “immediately notified US Coast Guard to activate the Search and Rescue system” for three people who survived the strike. The coast guard said in a statement that one of its ships recovered two dead bodies and one survivor and turned them over to the Costa Rican coast guard.
The strikes on suspected drug traffickers have been described as illegal by experts in international law, but the Pentagon appears to have changed strategy since the first attack in September when it ordered a follow-on strike to kill survivors. Killing survivors has been considered a textbook example of a war crime since 1945, when the victorious allies in the second world war prosecuted a Nazi U-boat crew for killing shipwreck survivors.
The latest attack brings the number of people who’ve been killed in boat strikes by the US military to at least 159 since the Trump administration began targeting those it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.
