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Iranian oil tanker damaged by explosions near Saudi port city Iranian oil tanker damaged by explosions near Saudi port city
(about 2 hours later)
An explosion damaged an Iranian oil tanker traveling through the Red Sea near Saudi Arabia on Friday, causing oil to leak into the Red Sea, Iranian media and the tanker’s owner have reported. An Iranian state owned oil tanker has been hit by two explosions in what has been described as a terrorist incident by Iranian official sources.
The National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) said in a statement that the hull of the Sabiti was hit by two separate explosions about 60 miles off the Saudi coast. The oil tanker named Sabiti was hit in the Gulf Sea around 60 miles from the Saudi port of Jeddah.
It said the blasts were “probably caused by missile strikes”. There have been no casualties, but the ship leaked oil into the sea.
“All the ship’s crew are safe and the ship is stable too,” said NITC, adding those on board were trying to repair the damage and the flow of oil into the sea had been stopped. The tanker was heading to Syria to unload its cargo. Two of the main oil tanks on the ship were hit by two separate explosions twenty minutes apart from what has been described as missiles. The attack occurred at 5 in the morning local time.
The semi-official ISNA news agency had quoted an anonymous source with direct knowledge of the incident and said the vessel was on fire, but the state-owned NITC said that contrary to reports, “there is no fire aboard the ship and the ship is completely stable”. Iranian state controlled news agencies claim that the ship was a victim of terrorism, a claim that raises the prospect that the ship was hit as a reprisal for previous Iranian attributed attacks on international shipping in United Arab Emirates ports, as well as the cruise missile attack on two major Aramco oil installations in Saudi Arabia on 14 September.
Iran’s Nour news agency, close to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said the situation was under control and no crew members were injured. All these attacks have been attributed by US and the UK to state actors, either directly or through surrogate forces.
The US Navy’s 5th Fleet, which oversees the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Confirming that the incident is not viewed as an accident, the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman said “Those behind the attack are responsible for the consequences of this dangerous adventure, including the dangerous environmental pollution caused,”
The reported explosion comes after the US has alleged that in past months Iran attacked oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Gulf, something denied by Tehran. He added: “The details and factors behind this act will be investigated and will be announced after the results are reached”.
The mysterious attacks on oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, Iran shooting down a US military surveillance drone and other incidents across the wider Middle East followed Trump’s decision to tighten sanctions on Iran. Suggestions that the oil company was blaming Saudi Arabia at this stage were denied.
The latest assault saw Saudi Arabia’s vital oil industry come under a drone-and-cruise-missile attack, halving the kingdom’s output. Iran has denied responsibility for all these attacks, and the UN has yet to publish a planned detailed assessment of the source of the September 14 attack even though the UN inspectors visited the site a fortnight ago. Both the European leaders and the US said the likely source of the attack was Iran, and not Houthi rebels based in Yemen.
Yemen’s Houthi group claimed responsibility for the attacks, but a US official said they originated from south-western Iran. Riyadh blamed Tehran. Iran, which supports the Houthis in Yemen’s war, has denied any involvement. It would be the first major attack on Iranian owned shipping in the Gulf although a Iranian owned tanker Grace 1 was seized by the British off Gibraltar on the basis that the ship was breaching EU oil embargo.
Oil prices surged more than two percent as the suspected missile strike sparked fresh supply concerns with tensions already high after last month’s attacks on two Saudi crude facilities. Iranian news agencies stressed that the ship was stable, no crew had been injured and the leakage was being brought under control.
The Sabiti last turned on its tracking devices in August near the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas. Iranian tankers routinely turn off their trackers as US sanctions target the sale of Iran’s crude oil. The National Iranian Petroleum Corporation said “the ship and all its staff are now safe and sound, and only the ship’s body has been slightly damaged, which the ship’s staff is trying to control.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report “The ship’s technical experts and experts at the National Petroleum Corporation’s emergency room are investigating the cause and causes of the accident”.
Iranian ships routinely turn off their transponders to prevent tracking, but Sabiti turned on its tracking devices late Friday morning in the Red Sea, according to data from MarineTraffic.com.
The vessel last turned on its tracking devices in August near the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas.
Dryad Global, a firm specialising in oil shipping intelligence, said commented the proximity to the port of Jeddah, made it plausible that Saudi Arabia could have been involved within the incident, or at the very least, the incident is intended to create the perception of Saudi involvement.
But it added: “In terms of Saudi interests within the region, it remains unclear why Saudi would seek to target Iran in this manner. An attack of relatively low sophistication with limited and almost negligible strategic gain would be highly irregular and not serve any Saudi strategic narrative. Further still it is highly unlikely that the Saudi’s would risk an ecological disaster in an area of strategic significance such as the Red Sea”.
Tension in the Strait of Hormuz has been heightened for months as the US and Iran spar over the US decision in 2018 to quit the Iranian nuclear deal and impose world-wide sanctions on Iran including its oil exports.
A bid by the French president Emmanuel Macron at the United General Assembly in New York to engineer a meeting between the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani and the US president Donald Trump failed as the two sides could not reach agreement on the sequencing of the compromises the two sides would have to take. Since then the Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has stepped forward as a possible mediator between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The perception was that that neither Saudi Arabia nor the United Arab Emirates, the two main Gulf rivals to Iran, were looking to escalate the crisis by undertaking a military response to the Aramco response, but they have been a pragmatic judgement that the US would not support any such measures. It would be surprising if either Gulf State resorted to the kind of plausible deniability tactics deployed by Iran Israel is also deeply hostile to Iran but has confined most of its attacks to Iranian military sites in Syria.
The current round of attacks on oil shipping started on May 12 when four ships, including two Saudi oil tankers, were attacked in the Gulf just outside the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route.
US officials and British officials pinned the blame on Iran, a charge Tehran denies. A further two tankers were hit on June 13, and a week later Iran said it had shot down a US survellance drone, an attack that nearly led to a major reprisal by the US administration.
The Houthis claimed responsibility for Sept 14 drone attacks on Saudi Aramco plants in Abqaiq and Khurais, but the US said the attacks came from the direction of Iran.
Oil prices jumped 2% after reports of the tanker explosion, with benchmark Brent and US West Texas Intermediate crude futures rising more than $1 a barrel.
IranIran
Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia
Middle East and North AfricaMiddle East and North Africa
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