By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to send the two survivors of a Thursday strike in the Caribbean to a different country rather than seek long-term military detention for them, four U.S. officials told Reuters on Saturday.
Reuters could not definitively establish the nationalities of the two detainees. One of the officials said it was possible that one of them was Colombian, but did not offer that information with certainty.
The U.S. military staged a helicopter rescue for the survivors on Thursday after the strike on their semi-submersible vessel, suspected of trafficking illegal narcotics. The strike killed the other two crew members on board, sources told Reuters on Friday.
The U.S. military flew the survivors to a U.S. Navy warship in the Caribbean, where they were detained until at least Friday evening. It was not clear if they had already been flown off the ship as of Saturday morning.
The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expected the survivors to eventually be sent to their home countries. It was unclear what conditions might exist surrounding such a transfer, including whether they would be detained.
The decision to send the survivors home means that the U.S. military will not have to grapple with thorny legal issues surrounding military detention for suspected drug traffickers, whose alleged crimes do not fall neatly under the laws of war, legal experts say.
Speaking on Friday, Trump told reporters that the strike was against “a drug-carrying submarine built specifically for the transportation of massive amounts of drugs.”
He did not comment on how many were killed or survived the strike.
The Pentagon has offered no details on the attack so far and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; editing by Diane Craft and Nick Zieminski)
