By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Jan 27 (Reuters) – Family members of two men killed in a U.S. missile attack on a suspected drug boat near Venezuela filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Tuesday, alleging the pair were killed in a “manifestly illegal” military campaign targeting civilian vessels.
Civil rights lawyers filed the lawsuit in federal court in Boston, marking the first court challenge to one of 36 US missile attacks on ships in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean authorized by President Donald Trump’s administration that have killed more than 120 people since September.
The family members of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo—two Trinidadian men who were among six killed during a strike on October 14—say in the lawsuit that the two men worked fishing and farming in Venezuela and were returning to their homes in Las Cuevas, Trinidad when they were attacked.
“These are lawless murders in cold blood; murders for sport and murders for theater, and that is why we need a court of law to proclaim what is true and limit what is lawless,” said Baher Azmy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement.
His group and the American Civil Liberties Union filed the new lawsuit under the Death on the High Seas Act, a maritime law that allows family members to sue for wrongful deaths that occur on the high seas, and the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows foreign nationals to sue in US courts for violations of international law.
The suit was filed by Lenore Burnley, Joseph’s mother, and Sallycar Korasingh, Samaroo’s sister, and only seeks damages from the US government for the two deaths, not an injunction to prevent further strikes.
But the case could provide a way for a court to evaluate whether the October 14 strike was legal.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration formulated the attacks carried out under the direction of the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as a war with the drug cartels, and alleged that these were armed groups. It said that its attacks are in line with the international rules known as the law of war or the law of armed conflict.
But the attacks have drawn scrutiny from Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, who have not authorized attacks on drug cartels, and condemnation from human rights groups. Legal experts have previously said that drug cartels do not fit the accepted international definition of an armed group.
Tuesday’s lawsuit argues that the killing of Joseph and Samaroo outside of an armed conflict, while they were not taking part in military hostilities against the United States amounted to murder and should be considered a wrongful death on the high seas and an extrajudicial killing under international law.
“If the US government believed that Rishi had done something wrong, they should have arrested him, charged him, and detained him, not killed him,” Korasingh said in a statement. “They must be held accountable.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Aurora Ellis)