- US was sending two suspected drug traffickers to Ecuador and Colombia after a strike on their submarine
- Donald Trump said the submarine was loaded with fentanyl and other drugs
- Trump claimed 25,000 people would have died if he had allowed the submarine to come ashore
President Donald Trump said Saturday the United States was sending two suspected drug traffickers back to their native Ecuador and Colombia, after a military strike on their "drug-smuggling submarine" in the Caribbean that killed two others.
"It was my great honor to destroy a very large DRUG-CARRYING SUBMARINE that was navigating towards the United States on a well known narcotrafficking transit route," Trump said on his Truth Social platform, adding that the vessel was loaded with fentanyl and other drugs.
"Two of the terrorists were killed. The two surviving terrorists are being returned to their Countries of origin, Ecuador and Colombia, for detention and prosecution."
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 18, 2025
Colombian President Gustavo Petro confirmed that the Colombian suspect had been repatriated.
"We are glad he is alive and he will be prosecuted according to the law," Petro said on social media platform X.
The strike, which Trump had announced on Friday, was the latest in an unprecedented US military campaign that he says is aimed at choking the flow of drugs from Latin America to the United States.
READ: US Revokes Visa For Colombian President As He Asked Soldiers To Disobey Trump
At least six vessels, most of them speedboats, have been targeted by US strikes in the Caribbean since September, with Venezuela alleged to be the origin of some of them.
Washington says its campaign is dealing a decisive blow to drug trafficking, but it has provided no evidence that the people killed -- at least 27 so far -- were drug smugglers.
Experts say such summary killings are illegal even if they target confirmed narcotics traffickers.
Washington has not revealed the departure point of the alleged drug-smuggling submarine.
Semi-submersibles built in clandestine jungle shipyards have for years been used to ferry cocaine from South America, particularly Colombia, to Central America or Mexico, usually via the Pacific Ocean.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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