ISTANBUL — Iran said it had seized another foreign vessel suspected of smuggling fuel in the Persian Gulf, state media reported on Sunday, adding to growing tensions over a spate of incidents involving oil tankers in the region.
Iran’s naval forces detained the ship and its seven-member crew Wednesday in a “surprise operation,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said in a statement carried by local news agencies.
The Revolutionary Guard didn’t identify the ship, which it said was carrying roughly 185,000 gallons of smuggled diesel fuel. The vessel is the third seized by the Revolutionary Guard in recent weeks amid a simmering standoff between Iran and the West in the Persian Gulf region.
Last month Iran captured the British-flagged Stena Impero and Panama-flagged Riah, which it also accused of involvement in fuel smuggling operations. Both of those vessels were seized in the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for global oil shipments.
The incidents follow a string of attacks on petrochemical tankers in and around the strait in recent months, acts of sabotage the United States blamed on Iran.
A Revolutionary Guard commander, Gen. Ramazan Zirahi, said Sunday that the vessel was seized in Iranian territorial waters after it “received fuel from other ships and was transferring it to Persian Gulf Arab states,” state television reported, according to the Associated Press.
It was seized near Farsi Island, which hosts a Revolutionary Guard naval base. It was unclear, however, why the ship would be transferring fuel to Arab gulf states, which are also major energy exporters.
The United States has worked to cripple Iran’s oil exports as part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure campaign” to isolate the Islamic republic. The sanctions have given rise to smuggling operations, industry analysts say, including efforts to mask the locations of large tankers transporting Iranian crude in defiance of U.S. sanctions.
Last month, Iranian media reported that more than 2 million gallons of government-subsidized fuel is smuggled out of the country daily.
In its statement Sunday, the Revolutionary Guard portrayed its seizure of the vessel as part of its “operations to detect and fight against organized smuggling.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iran-says-it-has-seized-third-foreign-tanker-in-persian-gulf/2019/08/04/0b288e7a-b6d1-11e9-8e83-4e6687e99814_story.html
2019-08-04 18:09:31Z
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