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The attack comes amid renewed scrutiny of the Trump administration's campaign against suspected drug traffickers.
The US military carried out another deadly attack on a suspected drug smuggling ship in the Caribbean, killing four people, according to the Pentagon.
Thursday's attack comes as US President Donald Trump's administration faces new scrutiny over the attacks after it was revealed that a ship had been hit twice during a September 2 attack.
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Experts have said such an attack could constitute a war crime.
In a post on X, US Southern Command said the latest attack was led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The military “conducted a lethal kinetic attack against a ship in international waters operated by a designated terrorist organization,” it said.
“Intelligence confirmed that the ship was carrying illicit narcotics and was transiting a known drug trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narcoterrorists aboard the ship were killed,” he said.
The Trump administration has killed more than 80 suspected drug traffickers in the months of the campaign.
But revelations about the Sept. 2 strike have prompted new scrutiny and investigations by bipartisan committees in Congress.
The White House has denied that Hegseth ordered the second attack on the ship after an initial attack. Instead, they said the second attack that appeared to kill two survivors of the first attack was ordered by Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.
The White House has said the second attack still complied with the laws of armed conflict. Legal experts have said attacking unarmed combatants is a war crime. The army's own manual says it is illegal to shoot at shipwrecks.
Bradley appeared on Capitol Hill on Thursday for a series of closed-door briefings. He denied that he had been ordered to kill everyone on board.
Lawmakers gave conflicting accounts of the briefings.
“Bradley was very clear that he received no such order, to give no quarter or kill them all,” said Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to The Associated Press news agency.
“The order was basically: destroy the drugs, kill the 11 people on the ship,” said Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
Smith said video of the attack showed the survivors were “basically two shirtless people clinging to the bow of an overturned, inoperable boat, floating in the water, until the missiles came and killed them.”
Even before the revelations about the September 2 double attack, human rights groups had said the attacks amounted to extrajudicial executions.
Earlier this week, Alejandro Carranza's family filed a complaint with a regional human rights body, saying the Colombian fisherman's right to life was violated when he was unjustly killed in a US attack in September.
The Trump administration has framed the attack as part of a broader “war” against so-called “narcoterrorists,” but Congress has not passed any declarations of war or laws on the use of force.
The latest attack comes as the United States continues to increase its military assets near the coast of Venezuela, and Trump repeatedly threatens that ground attacks could occur “very soon.”
Venezuela's leader Nicolás Maduro has said the US pressure campaign aims to overthrow his government.
