By Canadian Press

Officials tell AP that Iran seized Vietnamese oil tanker

Nov 3, 2021 | 12:07 PM

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran seized a Vietnamese-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman last month and still holds the vessel, two U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday, revealing the latest provocation in Mideast waters as tensions escalate between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear program.

One of the officials said that Iran’s powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard troops took control of the MV Southys on Oct. 24 at gunpoint. U.S. forces had monitored the seizure, but ultimately didn’t take action as the vessel sailed into Iranian waters.

A motive for the seizure remains unclear. Officials at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ship-tracking data analyzed by the AP from MarineTraffic.com showed the vessel still off Iran’s southern port of Bandar Abbas on Tuesday. A satellite photo from Planet Labs Inc. also showed the vessel off Bandar Abbas in recent days.

The two U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity as the information had yet to be made public amid ongoing attempts to restart talks over Iran’s tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Negotiations have stalled in Vienna since the election of hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi in June, allowing Iran to press ahead with its nuclear program and raising alarm in Western capitals. Iran’s top nuclear negotiator said last week that talks would resume in November, but didn’t provide a specific date.

The officials spoke to AP after Iranian state television offered a series of contradictory reports about a confrontation between the Guard and the U.S. Navy’s Mideast-based 5th Fleet. State TV sought to cast the incident as an act of American aggression against Iran in the Gulf of Oman, with the U.S. Navy detaining a tanker carrying Iranian oil and the Guard freeing it and bringing it back to the Islamic Republic.

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The U.S. officials dismissed Iran’s version of events. Tehran also did not provide details of the ship’s name, nor any explanation of why the Navy might target it. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deluge of Iranian claims came as the Islamic Republic prepared to mark the 42nd anniversary of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, which triggered the 444-day hostage crisis and bred decades of acrimony.

Iranian officials heralded the ship’s impoundment as a heroic act, with Raisi lauding the Revolutionary Guard on Twitter. The country’s oil minister, Javad Owji, thanked the Guard for “rescuing the Iranian oil tanker from American pirates.”

State TV released footage showing an Iranian surveillance drone monitoring a hulking red tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Heavily armed Iranian commandos then rappelled onto the boat from a helicopter as small speedboats surrounded the vessel and an Iranian catamaran ship patrolled the waters.

The video appeared to show Iranian Guard troops pointing uncovered deck-mounted machine guns at the USS The Sullivans, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer. Photos released by the U.S. military show The Sullivans recently in the Arabian Sea near the Gulf of Oman.

The status and makeup of the Sothys’ crew wasn’t immediately known. A shipping database showed the vessel’s last registered owner as OPEC Petrol Transportation Co., a firm with a Hanoi address. A telephone number for the company could not immediately be found.

Iran’s seizure of the Southys would be the latest in a string of hijackings and explosions to roil the Gulf of Oman, which sits near the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all traded oil passes.

The U.S. Navy blamed Iran for a series of limpet mine attacks on vessels that damaged tankers in 2019, as well as for a fatal drone attack on an Israeli-linked oil tanker that killed two European crew members earlier this year. Just a few months ago, Iranian hijackers stormed and briefly captured a Panama-flagged asphalt tanker off the United Arab Emirates.

Tehran denies carrying out the attacks, but a wider shadow war between Iran and the West has played out in the region’s volatile waters since then-President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed crushing sanctions on the country.

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Associated Press writers Isabel DeBre in Dubai and Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

Jon Gambrell, The Associated Press