Supertanker carrying Iranian oil halted
LONDON — British marines and the port authorities in Gibraltar on Thursday detained a supertanker that was carrying crude oil from Iran to Syria, a violation of European Union sanctions against Syria.
The seizure of the ship threatened to raise tensions between Iran and the West.
Spain said the vessel had been detained at the request of the United States, and Iran summoned the British ambassador over what a Foreign Ministry spokesman called an “illegal” seizure.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Seyed Abbas Mousavi, confirmed Thursday that the detained ship, the Grace 1, was carrying crude oil from Iran, according to Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency.
Although President Donald Trump has imposed sanctions to choke off Iran’s exports of oil and petrochemical products, the British and Gibraltar authorities cited not those sanctions but the European Union ones against sanctions on Syria as the reason for detaining the tanker.
“We have reason to believe that the Grace 1 was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria,” Fabian Picardo, chief minister of Gibraltar, said in a statement. “That refinery is the property of an entity that is subject to European Union sanctions against Syria.”
Spain’s acting Foreign Minister Josep Borrell told reporters that the oil tanker had been seized following “a request from the United States to the United Kingdom.”
He said Spain had been kept informed about the seizure, but he offered no details to support his assertion about an American request.
Although it’s not illegal under international law to buy or ship Iranian oil or related products, foreign companies that do so risk punishment by the United States.
Iran has been largely cut off from European markets by the U.S. sanctions, which were imposed by the Trump administration after it withdrew the United States from the nuclear accord.
The European parties to the nuclear accord, including Britain, have tried to preserve the fraying deal, which had promised economic relief in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program.
But Tehran exceeded a critical limit of the accord Monday, and threatened to breach another as early as Sunday, after weeks of escalating tensions with the United States and months of increasingly dire economic conditions in Iran.
Some of the world’s shipping fleets have defied the sanctions to continue doing business with Iran.
Companies that monitor international shipping say the Grace 1 turned off its electronic tracking devices as it sailed into Iranian waters, then turned them on again after leaving — a tactic often used to evade the sanctions, though ships still can be followed through satellite photography.
The British Foreign Office had no immediate response Thursday afternoon.
On Twitter, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt praised Gibraltar and the British marines “for this bold move to enforce Syria sanctions.” He said they had denied “valuable resources” to the Syrian government.
The State Department and the U.S. National Security Council also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mousavi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a post on Twitter that Britain’s ambassador to Iran, Rob Macaire, had been summoned to the Iranian Embassy over the seizure.
“We told the ambassador that their action is very strange because these sanctions are not imposed by the Security Council and Iran rejects them,” Mousavi said, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Mousavi said Britain’s seizure signaled “a kind of cross-border sanctions enforcement that the European Union always opposed.”
Samir Madani, a co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, which follows maritime traffic using satellite data, said the ship was anchored near the Iranian oil terminal at Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf in mid-April.
Later, he said, it sat deep in the water, indicating that it was carrying oil from Iran.
The tanker, which exceeds the size limits for the Suez Canal, sailed around Africa to reach the Mediterranean, ending up in Gibraltar for unexplained reasons.
“For some odd reason they decided to go to Gibraltar,” Madani said.
Various shipping websites list the tanker as a 300,000-ton vessel more than 1,000 feet long, built in the 1990s and flying the flag of Panama.
The seizure also threatened to aggravate a dispute between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar, a British territory that Spain contests.
Borrell, who is set to take over as the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said the Spanish government would study whether Britain’s actions had violated its territorial water claims.
Spain does not recognize Britain’s sovereignty over Gibraltar, which dates to a 1713 treaty.