US lawmakers are pressing the Trump administration for answers about military strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug boats, after a report alleged that a follow-up strike was ordered to kill survivors of an initial attack.
Republican-led committees overseeing the Pentagon have vowed to conduct vigorous oversight into the US boat strikes in the Caribbean, following the report.
On Friday, The Washington Post reported that a US strike on a boat on September 2 left two survivors, but that a second attack was carried out to comply with Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's orders to kill everybody on board - raising fresh legality questions.
Hegseth decried the report as fake news.
On Sunday, US President Donald Trump said he believed his defence secretary 100%.
In recent weeks, the US has expanded its military presence in the Caribbean and carried out a series of lethal strikes on suspected drug-smuggling boats in international waters off Venezuela and Colombia, as part of what it calls an anti-narcotics operation.
More than 80 people have been killed since early September.
The Trump administration says it is acting in self-defence by destroying boats carrying illicit drugs to the US.
In its report on Friday, which has not been verified by the BBC, The Washington Post wrote that Secretary Hegseth gave a spoken directive to kill everybody on board one such vessel, and a Special Operations commander overseeing the operation ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth's instructions.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers appearing on US talk shows on Sunday said they supported congressional reviews of the boat strikes.
The leaders said they did not know whether The Washington Post's report was true, but that attacking survivors of an initial missile strike presented major legal concerns.
This raises to the level of a war crime if it's true, said Democratic Senator Tim Kaine on CBS Face the Nation.
Republican lawmaker Mike Turner acknowledged that Congress did not have information that the follow-up strike had happened.
Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act, he stated.
The comments follow the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee's announcement on Friday that it planned to conduct vigorous oversight on the strikes.
The House Armed Services Committee also stated it was taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question.
In a post on X, Hegseth pushed back against accusations against him, calling them fabricated, inflammatory, and derogatory. He emphasized that the strikes were lawful.
The Venezuelan National Assembly condemned the boat strikes and vowed to carry out a rigorous and thorough investigation into the accusations of a second attack that allegedly killed survivors.
The US military's legal advisers have advised that force should generally be used non-lethally to stop a boat, unless in cases of hot pursuit where a vessel is chased from a country's waters into high seas.
