WASHINGTON, December 1. /TASS/. US President Donald Trump said he intends to review media reports alleging that the US military deliberately killed survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean in September.

"I'm going to find out about it," the US leader said when asked to comment on a report by The Washington Post. The newspaper, citing sources, asserted that in early September Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth ordered the killing of everyone on board a boat in the southern Caribbean that the US believed was being used for drug trafficking. According to the report, the US military carried out two strikes on September 2: the first to destroy the boat, which had 11 people on board, and the second to kill the two survivors who were in the water clinging to the wreckage.

"I don't know [if] that happened," Trump added. "Pete said he did not order the death of those two men," the US president said, adding that Hegseth insisted nothing of the kind had taken place. "I wouldn't have wanted that," Trump stressed when asked whether the decision to launch a secong strike would have been the right one. The president spoke to reporters aboard his plane en route to Washington from Florida, where he had spent the weekend.

Earlier, Mike Turner, a Republican Representative from Ohio, said lawmakers in both houses of Congress had launched an investigation into the reports. He noted that Congress did not yet know whether the information published was accurate.

On November 29, Trump wrote on Truth Social that all "airlines, pilots, drug dealers and human traffickers" should consider the airspace over and around Venezuela "closed in its entirety."

The same day, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources, that Trump told Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in a phone conversation that if he did not leave office voluntarily, Washington could take forceful measures. On November 30, the White House host confirmed that he had spoken with Maduro but did not provide details.