Blast-hit tanker anchors off UAE
Print Edition
A Japanese tanker, attacked in the Gulf in an incident that sparked a new standoff between Washington and Tehran, “arrived safely” yesterday at an anchorage off the UAE, its management said.
The Kokuka Courageous was carrying highly flammable methanol through the Gulf of Oman on Thursday when it and the Norwegian-operated Front Altair were rocked by explosions.
“Kokuka Courageous has arrived safely at the designated anchorage at Sharjah,” an emirate neighboring Dubai, the vessel’s Singapore-based BSM Ship Management said yesterday.
The crew, who remained on board, were “safe and well,” it said, adding that a damage assessment and transferring the ship’s cargo would start “once the port authorities have completed their standard security checks and formalities.”
BSM Ship Management had said earlier Kokuka Courageous was heading toward an anchorage on the eastern coast of the United Arab Emirates, facing the Gulf of Oman.
The other ship, the Front Altair, has left Iran’s territorial waters, multiple sources said on Saturday. It was “heading toward the Fujairah-Khor Fakkan area in the United Arab Emirates,” the port’s chief of Iran’s southern province of Hormozgan said.
A spokeswoman for Frontline Management, the Norwegian company which owns the ship, said “all 23 crew members of the tanker departed Iran” and flew to Dubai on Saturday.
The US military on Friday released grainy footage it said showed an Iranian patrol boat removing an “unexploded limpet mine” from the Japanese vessel. Tehran has vehemently denied any involvement.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the US claim as “baseless” and said Washington had “immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran — (without) a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence.”
Iran’s parliament speaker Ali Larijani hinted yesterday that Washington could be behind the “suspicious” tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman to pile pressure on Tehran.
“The suspicious actions against the tankers ... seem to complement the economic sanctions against Iran considering that (the US) has not achieved any results from them,” he told MPs.
He backed his claim by saying there had been a precedent “during World War II, when Americans targeted their own ships near Japan to create an excuse for hostility.”
A non-belligerent state at the beginning of World War II, the US went to war after Japan’s surprise attack on the American Pearl Harbor base in Hawaii on the morning of December 7, 1941.
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