Iranian judicial authorities have seized a overseas oil tanker and detained its 18 crew members within the Sea of Oman.
Reports in Iranian media mentioned the ship seized on December 12 was carrying some 6 million liters of smuggled gasoline.
Citing provincial judiciary officers in southern Hormozgan Province, Tasnim News Agency mentioned the tanker was impounded after it was intercepted and inspected off the port metropolis of Jask in Iranian-controlled waters.
“In addition to the organized transportation of smuggled gasoline, the tanker ignored the order to cease and tried to flee,” Mojtaba Ghahremani, head of provincial judiciary in Hormozgan, was quoted as saying by Tasnim.
He mentioned the tanker additionally lacked correct navigational and cargo paperwork and had its radar turned off. The crew was “intentionally destroying the ship’s tools on the time of the seizure,” Ghahremani mentioned.
Fars, one other semiofficial information company, reported that the crew was being questioned. It mentioned the crew members had been from South Asian nations, together with India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.
Ghahremani didn’t title the nation that owned the vessel.
Tehran has a historical past of seizing ships within the Persian Gulf, an important waterway for international gasoline provides. Over the years, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has accused many of the seized tankers of carrying smuggled gasoline, however it did not substantiate such accusations.
Last month, the IRGC confirmed the seizure of a overseas tanker named Talara. It was seized on November 14, a day after stories mentioned an oil tanker had diverted from the United Arab Emirates to Iranian waters.
The newest confiscation by Iran follows the United States’s seizure of a Tehran-linked tanker off the coast of Venezuela this week.
The vessel was below US Treasury Department sanctions since 2022 for allegedly serving to smuggle Iranian oil as a part of a community led by Ukrainian nationwide Viktor Artemov.
