(Reuters) – None of the 11 people killed in a U.S. military strike on a boat in the Caribbean last week were members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s interior minister said on Thursday, as the South American nation deployed troops amid heightened tensions with the U.S.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has said the boat was transporting illegal narcotics, but has provided scant further information about the incident, even amid demands from members of the U.S. Congress for a justification for the action.
“They openly confessed to killing 11 people,” Interior Minister and ruling party head Diosdado Cabello said on state television. “We have done our investigations here in our country and there are the families of the disappeared people who want their relatives and when we asked in the towns none were from Tren de Aragua, none were drug traffickers.”
“A murder has been committed against a group of citizens using lethal force,” added Cabello, questioning how the U.S. could determine whether drugs were on the boat and why the people were not instead arrested.
The Venezuelan government said after the incident that a video post by Trump of the strike was artificial intelligence.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said early on Thursday his country would deploy military, police and civilian defenses at 284 “battlefront” locations across the country, his latest show of military capacity.
(Reporting by Reuters, Editing by William Maclean)
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