Families sue US over deadly boat strike off Venezuela coast

The families of two Trinidadian men killed in a US strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat have filed a lawsuit against the American government.

Lawyers filed the claim in Boston’s federal court on behalf of relatives of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, among six men killed off the coast of Venezuela on 14 October.

One of the lawyers said in a statement that the strike amounted to “lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theatre”.

The US has struck at least 36 vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific since September, killing more than 120 people. The Trump administration has said it is targeting “narco-terrorists” carrying drugs that kill Americans.

The US has positioned its operations as a non-international armed conflict with the alleged traffickers, but legal experts say they could be in violation of the laws governing such conflict.

This lawsuit was filed on Tuesday under the Death on the High Seas Act, which allows family members to sue for wrongful deaths on the high seas, and is a statute that allows foreign citizens to sue in US courts for violating international law.

The case was brought by Joseph’s mother and Samaroo’s sister, who say the two men did fishing and farm work in Venezuela, and were returning to Trinidad and Tobago when their boat was struck.

Joseph’s mother Sallycar Korasingh added that if the US government believed her son had done something wrong, “it should have arrested, charged and detained him, not murdered him”.

The lawsuit argues that the killings should be deemed a wrongful death because the men were not taking part in military hostilities against the US.

The Pentagon has not yet responded to requests for comment.

It comes after the family of a Colombian man, who was killed in a separate US strike, took their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.