Santo Domingo: US warplanes attacked a drug-running boat off the coast of the Dominican Republic, its drug enforcement agency and a US official announced Sunday in an expansion of American military activity in the Caribbean.
The head of the DNCD anti-narcotics agency announced the strike at a joint press conference with a spokesperson for the US embassy.
The latter official said this attack is the one President Donald Trump first announced Friday without saying where it had taken place, following several US attacks on alleged drug boats off Venezuela.
In this newly reported strike, American military jets attacked a speed boat carrying 1,000 kilos of cocaine 80 nautical miles from the Dominican island of Beata, DNCD spokesman Carlos Devers told the news conference.
A source close to the investigation of this case said the boat probably left originally from Venezuela.
The United States has now acknowledged three recent attacks in the Caribbean that have killed more than a dozen people.
It is attacking and destroying such vessels rather than seizing them and arresting their crew, which is the normal procedure in such anti-drug operations.
Trump said Friday the US military had struck a drug trafficking boat in international waters, killing three people.
