UK stops sharing intelligence with US over Trump’s ‘illegal’ attacks

The UK government has stopped sharing intelligence about the movements of alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean over fears the attacks on the vessels are ‘illegal’.

The British Government has often given intelligence assets to the American government, allowing them to identify and track boats which are ferrying drugs through the sea.

In September, a strike against a Venezuelan gang in the Caribbean left 11 people dead in international waters, prompting questions about the legality of the attack.

After, Trump said: ‘Obviously, they won’t do it again. There were massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people, and everybody fully understands that.’

The operation was carried out in international waters, in the Caribbean, and those on board were alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which is a designated foreign terrorist organisation in the US.

After these deadly strikes in international waters, the UK’s concerns about being complicit in an illegal strike grew.

Sources told CNN that UK officials believe the September strike, and others, violate international law, having killed 76 people so far.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk went one step further – calling them ‘extrajudicial killing’.

The US has a longstanding policy not to comment on intelligence matters and has not responded to the halting of intelligence sharing with the UK.

Trump’s deployment of the military to the Caribbean earlier this year was a drastic change in the normal approach to intercepting drug trafficking boats.

The Coast Guard and law enforcement would work together to intercept, board the boats, and seize any illegal items.

The method now appears to ‘blow them up, get rid of them’. Those were the words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in September.

The US hasn’t signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, in which signatories agree not to interfere with vessels in international waters.

The only exceptions to this are seizing a state during a ‘hot pursuit’, which sees countries chase the boats into international waters if the vessel is in their own waters. Even then, force is only used in a ‘non-lethal’ manner, experts say.

Trump has cited his designation of the gang he suspects to be behind the drug smuggling as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation as grounds to launch the deadly strikes.

Professor Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told the BBC: ‘The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets.

‘The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organisation.’

Despite being involved in some drug smuggling, the gang itself isn’t involved in large-scale smuggling of cocaine, according to InSight Crime, which published a report on the gang based on two years of research.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.