U.S. military forces boarded another sanctioned tanker in the Indian Ocean after tracking the vessel from the Caribbean Sea in an effort to target illicit oil connected to Venezuela, the Pentagon said Sunday.

Venezuela had faced U.S. sanctions on its oil for several years, relying on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains.

President Donald Trump ordered a quarantine of sanctioned tankers in December to pressure Nicolas Maduro before the Venezuelan strongman was seized in January during the American raid.

Several tankers fled the Venezuelan coast in the wake of the raid, including the ship that was boarded in the Indian Ocean overnight.

The War Department said in a post on X that U.S. forces boarded the Veronica III, conducting "a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding."

"The vessel tried to defy President Trump's quarantine — hoping to slip away," the Pentagon said. "We tracked it from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, closed the distance, and shut it down."

Video posted by the Pentagon shows U.S. troops boarding the tanker.

The Veronica III is a Panamanian-flagged vessel under U.S. sanctions related to Iran, according to the website of the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The Panama Maritime Authority said Sunday in a brief statement that the ship was no longer registered there and had been canceled in December 2024.

The Veronica III left Venezuela on Jan. 3, the same day as Maduro's capture, with nearly 2 million barrels of crude and fuel oil, TankerTrackers.com posted Sunday on X.

"Since 2023, she's been involved with Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil," the organization said.

Samir Madani, CEO of TankerTrackers.com, told The Associated Press in January that his organization used satellite imagery and surface-level photos to document that at least 16 tankers left the Venezuelan coast in contravention of the quarantine.

The Trump administration has been seizing tankers as part of its broader efforts to take control of the Venezuela's oil.

The Pentagon did not say in the post whether the Veronica III was formally seized and placed under U.S. control, and later told AP in an email that it had no additional information to provide beyond that post.

Last week, the U.S. military boarded a different tanker in the Indian Ocean, the Aquila II.

The ship was being held while its ultimate fate was decided by the U.S., according to a defense official who spoke last week on condition of anonymity to discuss decision-making.