Survivors on ‘narco bot’ targeted by Trump order were blown up after Hegseth’s verbal order to ‘kill them all’: report

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a verbal order to release any survivors after Donald Trump’s administration launched the first of more than a dozen raids on alleged drug-running boats in the past three months that have killed more than 80 people.

On September 2, US military personnel fired a missile in the Caribbean that struck a ship that was carrying 11 people accused of drug trafficking to the United States.

When two survivors emerged from the wreckage, a special operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions to “kill everyone.” The Washington PostCiting officials with direct knowledge of the operation.

According to the report, the two men were “blown separately into the water”.

News of Hegseth’s alleged command follows intense legal scrutiny from international investigators and members of Congress over whether the Trump administration’s deadly campaign amounts to extrajudicial killings, which legal-war experts are talking about. independent Directly labeled as murder and war crimes.

independent Comment has been requested from the Pentagon.

In September, the Trump administration told Congress that the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “illegal combatants.”

Administration officials have labeled the cartels “non-state armed groups” whose actions include “armed aggression against the United States” and now engage in “non-international armed conflict” — or war with a non-state actor.

In the weeks that followed, the Trump administration directed more than a dozen attacks on ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean that killed more than 80 people but has not publicly provided any evidence or legal justification for their deaths, according to lawmakers and civil rights groups.

A newly unveiled legal memo from the Justice Department claims that military personnel involved in the strike will not face criminal charges in the future, a move legal experts and national security scholars say fails to prevent the risk of potential criminal liability.

According to officials and experts, the alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat to the United States and are not in what the administration has labeled an “armed conflict” with the country.

“The term for premeditated killing outside of armed conflict is assassination,” said Brian Finucane, senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a conflict policy nonprofit.

“And the Trump administration has not established that these attacks are taking place in an armed conflict nor that the targets would be legitimate under the laws of war,” he said. independent this month.

While it’s not clear what guidance the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel provided the administration, the White House appears to be using the guidance as a “legal permission slip to conduct actions that would otherwise be criminal.”

Asked why he would not seek authorization from Congress for his military campaign targeting the South American regime, which he claims has fueled a drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government was “just going to kill people.”

“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people who bring drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said during a White House roundtable with administration officials last month.

“They’re, like, dead, okay,” he said.

Trump shared footage of the first strike on September 2 in a post on his Truth social account the next day, warning that the attack “served as a warning to anyone thinking of bringing drugs into the United States. BEWARE!”

The president said the 11 people on board were “terrorists” from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.

This is a developing story