The trick of the crew members who foiled the Iranian hijacker’s assault on an oil tanker off the United Arab Emirates

The hijackers who captured a ship off the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman and they left the ship this wednesday They were surprised by a ruse by the ship’s crew, who had managed to communicate briefly by radio a few minutes earlier to denounce that Iranian gunmen attacked the tanker.

According to British sources who spoke to The Times, there were five or six Iranians in the assailant group, but the sailors on board quickly mobilized and sabotaged the vessel’s engines so that it could no longer move.

The incident – described the day before by British military service of UK maritime trade operations as a “possible hijack” – rekindled fears of an escalation in Middle Eastern waters and ended as much of the mystery as it started.

Clues to what happened to the Panamanian-flagged Asphalt Princess came from a maritime radio recording obtained by commodity pricing firm Argus Media and shared with the AP agency. In audio, crew member is heard telling Emirati Coast Guard that five or six armed Iranians boarded the tanker.

“Iranians are on board with ammunitionSays the crew member. “We’re … now adrift. We cannot say exactly our estimated time of arrival at Sohar”, The port of Oman shown on the ship’s tracker as the destination. It was not clear whether the crew members, whom he identified as Indians and Indonesians, were in danger at the time of check-in.

No one took responsibility for the brief kidnapping, who highlighted rising tensions as Iran and the United States seek a solution to their confrontation over Tehran’s ill-fated 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

In an apparent response, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh on Tuesday denied that Iran had played a role. He called the recent maritime attacks in the Persian Gulf “completely suspect”.

The rising tensions took place in the waters of the Persian Gulf, where last week a drone attack on an oil tanker linked to an Israeli billionaire off the coast of Oman killed two crew members. The West blamed Iran for the incursion, which was the first fatal attack recorded in the cargo ship battle in Middle Eastern waters. Iran has denied its participation.

Late tuesday the raiders boarded the Asphalt Princess which sailed off Fujairah, according to the authorities. The official Army of Oman news agency said it had received information that the ship had been hijacked and immediately dispatched Royal Air Force maritime patrol planes and navy ships “to assist in securing international waters “.

In recorded radio traffic When the Emirati Coast Guard asks the crew member what the Iranian gunmen were doing on board, he says he “cannot understand the (Iranians)”, muffled voice, before trying to pass the radio on to someone else. The call is then disconnected.

From Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price said U.S. officials they “also believe that these personnel were Iranian, but we are not able to confirm this at the moment”.

Possible signs of unrest began to emerge that night when six tankers off the coast of Fujairah announced at around the same time via their automatic identification system trackers that they were not “under command” , according to the MarineTraffic portal. Usually this means that the vessel has lost power and cannot steer.

Satellite tracking data showed the Asphalt Princess was gradually heading for Iranian waters off the port of Jask early Wednesday, according to MarineTraffic. However, hours later it stopped and changed course to Oman, just before the British Navy group declared the hijackers had left and the ship was “safe”.

In an analysis, Maritime intelligence firm Dryad Global has described the hijacking of the Asphalt Princess as Iran’s latest response to external pressures, economic conflicts and other grievances.

“Iran has always shown that by carrying out this type of operation, it does so in a calculated way, both targeting ships directly linked to ongoing disputes and (ships) operating in the “gray space” of legitimacy.“Who may be involved in the illicit trade,” said Dryad Global.

The owner of the Asphalt Princess, listed as Glory International, based in the UAE Free Zone, could not be reached for comment.

The Middle East-based US Army Fifth Fleet and the UK Department of Defense also did not respond to requests for comment. The UAE government has not acknowledged the incident.

The Gulf of Oman is located near the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all traded oil passes. Fujairah, on the east coast of the United Arab Emirates, is one of the main ports in the region where ships receive new oil shipments, stock up or exchange crews.

In the past two years, after then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal and imposed crushing sanctions, Fujairah waters have been the scene of a series of explosions and kidnappings. The US Navy has blamed Iran for a series of limpet mine attacks on ships that damaged tankers.

In 2019, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards arrested a British-flagged tanker, the Stena Impero, near the Strait of Hormuz. Last year, an oil tanker wanted by the United States for allegedly circumventing sanctions against Iran was hijacked off the Emirati coast and then ended up in Iran, although Tehran has never recognized the incident.

And in January, armed Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers assaulted a South Korean tanker and forced the ship to change course and head for Iran. Although Iran has claimed it had held up the ship for contamination reasons, it appeared to link the seizure to negotiations over the billions of dollars in Iranian assets frozen in South Korean banks.

Last week’s attack on the tanker Mercer Street off the coast of Oman, in which two people were killed, drew criticism from the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. Israel launched a diplomatic initiative at the United Nations for the attack. Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks with UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab on Wednesday about the attack.

Blinken and Raab spoke of “ongoing efforts to forge a coordinated response to the attack on Iran,” according to the State Department. Raab underlined on Twitter the “need for Iran to stop its destabilizing behavior”.

(With AP information)

KEEP READING: