Iranian judicial authorities have seized a foreign oil tanker and detained its 18 crew members in the Sea of Oman.
Reports in Iranian media said the ship seized on December 12 was carrying some 6 million liters of smuggled fuel.
Citing provincial judiciary officials in southern Hormozgan Province, Tasnim News Agency said the tanker was impounded after it was intercepted and inspected off the port city of Jask in Iranian-controlled waters.
“In addition to the organized transportation of smuggled fuel, the tanker ignored the order to stop and attempted to escape,” Mojtaba Ghahremani, head of provincial judiciary in Hormozgan, was quoted as saying by Tasnim.
He said the tanker also lacked proper navigational and cargo documents and had its radar turned off. The crew was “deliberately destroying the ship’s equipment at the time of the seizure,” Ghahremani said.
Fars, another semiofficial news agency, reported that the crew was being questioned. It said the crew members were from South Asian nations, including India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.
Ghahremani did not name the country that owned the vessel.
Tehran has a history of seizing ships in the Persian Gulf, a vital waterway for global fuel supplies. Over the years, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has accused most of the seized tankers of carrying smuggled fuel, but it failed to substantiate such accusations.
Last month, the IRGC confirmed the seizure of a foreign tanker named Talara. It was seized on November 14, a day after reports said an oil tanker had diverted from the United Arab Emirates to Iranian waters.
The latest confiscation by Iran follows the United States’s seizure of a Tehran-linked tanker off the coast of Venezuela this week.
The vessel was under US Treasury Department sanctions since 2022 for allegedly helping smuggle Iranian oil as part of a network led by Ukrainian national Viktor Artemov.
