The deadly attack President Donald Trump ordered early this month on what he said was a drug-smuggling Venezuelan boat was a “heinous crime,” Venezuela’s president said Monday — just before Trump boasted of destroying a second boat.

Speaking to reporters in Caracas, the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, said the Sept. 2 attack, which killed 11 people, violated U.S. and international laws. If the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers — as U.S. officials have claimed — they should have been captured, he said.

Maduro called the action “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country” and claimed that the United States was trying to goad Venezuela into a “major war.” The American goal, Maduro claimed, was “

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