BREAKING: Four shot dead on US-registered speedboat by border guard, Cuba says

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Bernd Debusmann Jr

Four people who entered Cuban waters on a US-registered speedboat were shot dead by border guards, Cuba’s government said.

In a statement, Cuba’s interior ministry said that the speedboat’s passengers opened fire on a coast guard vessel that approached them.

Six additional passengers were wounded in the incident, which took place near an island on Cuba’s northern coast.

The identities of those on board the vessel or what it was doing in the area are unclear, with the Cuban government saying an investigation has been launched to “clarify” the event.

In statement posted on X, the ministry said the Florida-registered vessel – with the registration number FL7726SH – was detected near Cayo Falcones, in the country’s central Villa Clara province on Wednesday morning.

When a Cuban boat carrying five members of the ministry’s border guard approached the vessel for identification, “the crew of the violating speedboat opened fire” and wounded the Cuban commander, the statement said.

“As a consequence of the confrontation, as of the time of this report, four aggressors on the foreign vessel were killed and six injured.”

Those injured were evacuated and given medical assistance.

The BBC has contacted the US State Department and White House for comment.

Florida Representative Carlos Gimenez, a Cuban-American former mayor of Miami, said on X that he is demanding an “urgent” investigation into what he termed a “massacre”, adding that US authorities “must determine whether any of the victims were US citizens or legal residents”.

In a separate post, Gimenez added that the Cuban government “must be relegated to the dust bin of history”.

The incident comes amid increased tensions between the US and Cuba, which is facing a deepening fuel crisis that has been worsened by the US blocking oil shipments from Venezuela, a long-standing ally in the region, to the island.

The Cuban statement alluded to these tensions, saying that “in the face of current challenges, Cuba reaffirms its determination to protect it territorial waters” and safeguard its sovereignty.

The incident also comes as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Saint Kitts and Nevis to meet with Caribbean leaders amid the Trump administration’s push to ramp up pressure on Cuba’s government, as well as other regional issues.

The shooting incident also comes one day after Cuban-American groups in Miami commemorated the 1996 shoot-down of an aircraft that had been dropping leaflets over Cuba, killing four people.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/articles/cuba-says-four-shot-dead-191625240.html