United States Navy SEALs on Sunday rescued “hundreds” of enslaved children from the hold of a crude oil tanker berthed in San Francisco Bay, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News.
If all information is correct, the operation marks the second time in two years White Hats have freed captive children from either cargo ships or tankers near the California coast, a waypoint in the child sex trade industry. Real Raw News reported on a similar incident in November 2021.
On Saturday afternoon, an unknown tipster supplied the general’s office with near-real-time images of emaciated children standing shoulder-to-shoulder in what appeared to be the belly of a commercial tanker. One macabre picture showed barely clothed kids packed together as sardines in a tin. Some children had visible wounds on their arms, legs, faces, or torsos.
Gen. Smith’s experts validated the images’ metadata and identified the vessel as the Dubai Brilliance, a Marshall Islands-flagged supertanker anchored in San Francisco Bay between San Fran and Alameda. The 63,000-ton vessel was built in 2011 by Brilliance Maritime Inc., based in the United Arab Emirates. It can hold 20 million gallons of crude or, apparently, an unquantifiable number of children.
Public navigation logs show the vessel arrived in San Francisco on June 12, with no listed departure date; its most recent ports of call were Mongstad, Norway, Wilhelmshaven, Germany, and Skikda, Algeria—the latter of which, our source said, has a history of child trafficking.
After reviewing the images, Gen. Smith contacted his White Hat liaison at U.S. Navy WARCOM in Coronado, asking whether a team was available to investigate the claims.
Our source would not say how many SEALs or which team(s) took part in the rescue but admitted that a sizable force left Coronado due to the number of children allegedly held in captivity and the possibility of encountering hostiles on the ship. He added that a White Hat-aligned Coast Guard cutter was put on standby to aid in extraction.
After boarding the Dubai Brilliance at approximately 1:30 a.m., Sunday, the SEALs, without firing a single shot, neutralized nine armed goons, slitting their throats or garroting them.
They found kidnapped children in two parts of the ship, the oil hold compartments and the crew quarters. The scene in the hold mimicked what the SEALs had seen in the photographs, hundreds of terrified children, many malnourished, huddled together as if for warmth, crying so loudly their wails echoed off the hull. The SEALs estimated most kids were preteens, though some were barely old enough to walk. No children discovered in the hold were American, meaning the traffickers had put them aboard the ship at other ports of call, but the adolescents found locked in crew quarters were American citizens whom the kidnappers had brought to the boat while anchored in San Francisco Bay.
A twelve-year-old girl hugged her SEAL saviors, saying that “bad, dirty men” abducted her while she was riding a bicycle only a few yards from her doorstep in San Francisco.
The freshly kidnapped American children fared better than the foreigners in the hold; They hadn’t been confined long enough to sustain injuries or face starvation. The SEALs found 15 decaying corpses mixed among the living in the hold.
A rescue operation began immediately, and the SEALs and Coast Guard used skiffs and the cutter to expeditiously exfiltrate the tanker.
Our source would not quantify the exact number of children saved, but he said the Coast Guard made several round trips from Alameda to Dubai Brilliance.
The surviving foreign and domestic children, our source said, were brought to safety and are being identified so they can be returned to their proper families.