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On February 12, two vessels were boarded and searched off the coast of Somalia. The boarding force, which had deployed from the guided-missile destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81), searched the vessels and found a cache of weapons. According to a brief by the Department of Defense, the cache consisted of “thousands of AK-47 assault rifles, light machine guns, heavy sniper rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), and crew-served weapons.”
According to the report, the Churchill’s VBSS (Visit, Board, Search and Seizure) team discovered the weapons while conducting a flag verification boarding. Such boardings are common in the Arabian Sea where smugglers use unmarked dhows local motorized boats with medium cargo capacity to move illegal weapons, explosives, and military equipment.