US military strikes another suspected drug boat amid probe into first strike

US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) on Thursday said American forces had carried out yet another strike on a small vessel in the eastern Pacific, ending an almost three-week lull in a controversial maritime campaign that has now claimed at least 87 lives.

The latest operation is the 22nd strike launched by the US military against gunboats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific — targets the Trump administration insists are drug-smuggling craft, with no credible supporting evidence as yet available in the public domain.

But the expanding campaign, overseen by defence secretary Pete Hegseth, has drawn furious criticism from human-rights lawyers and some lawmakers, who argue that several of the attacks — particularly those involving follow-on strikes against survivors — may constitute war crimes under international law.

In deed, the relatives of a Colombian man have lodged the first official complaint against the United States over its airstrikes on boats suspected of transporting drugs, contending before the leading human-rights body in the Americas that his killing amounted to an unlawful execution.

In their petition, the family of Alejandro Carranza assert that the US military carried out a strike on his fishing vessel on 15 September as he travelled off Colombia’s Caribbean coast, breaching international human-rights obligations.

Meanwhile, footage released alongside SOUTHCOM’s current announcement shows a small craft skimming across calm waters moments before a blast engulfs it, leaving behind a burning wreck shrouded in thick smoke. According to the command’s social-media statement, four people were killed in Thursday’s attack.

The strike took place on the same day that Admiral Frank 'Mitch' Bradley delivered closed-door testimony to congressional committees investigating the very first operation in the series, carried out on 2 September. That incident has become central to a brewing scandal after reports alleged Bradley authorised a second strike to kill survivors in order to satisfy Hegseth’s expectations for “decisive outcomes”.

Bradley denied receiving any explicit “kill them all” directive from Hegseth. However, lawmakers who viewed classified video of the sequence of attacks emerged visibly shaken. While the Pentagon has insisted these boat strikes are lawful uses of military force against hostile traffickers, the footage has intensified doubts about the legal justification for President Donald Trump’s unprecedented decision to deploy wartime authorities against suspected smugglers in international waters.

Legal scholars have warned that firing on shipwrecked individuals — who no longer pose a threat and are unable to flee — could breach long-standing laws of armed conflict.

Accounts of what lawmakers saw diverged sharply along partisan lines. Republican Senator Tom Cotton said the survivors appeared to be attempting to right a capsized, drug-laden boat so they could “stay in the fight”.

Democrats offered a far darker interpretation. Congressman Jim Himes, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, described the footage as “one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in public service”, saying the individuals were plainly distressed, unarmed and stranded with no functioning vessel. “They were killed by the United States,” he said.

Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the survivors were “essentially two shirtless people hanging onto the bow of an inoperable boat, drifting helplessly — until the missiles come and kill them”.

The hearings come at a volatile moment for Hegseth, who is simultaneously facing a lawsuit from major US media outlets over his unprecedented restrictions on Pentagon press access — rules many argue were introduced precisely as scrutiny over the boat-strike campaign mounted.

With AP/PTI inputs