U.K. warns Iranians to return oil tanker
LONDON — Britain on Saturday threatened Iran with “serious consequences” for seizing a British-owned oil tanker the previous evening as the government warned ships to avoid the crucial shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz.
The British government said in a statement after an emergency meeting that it had “advised U.K. shipping to stay out of the area for an interim period.”
The crisis has caught Britain at a singularly vulnerable moment. Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to resign Wednesday. A leadership contest within the governing Conservative Party to determine her successor has all but paralyzed the government. And now the uncertainty about Britain’s internal direction is compounding the problem of forming a response to Iran’s seizure of the tanker.
The British defense minister, Penny Mordaunt, said in a television interview on Saturday that the ship had been intercepted in Omani, not Iranian, waters and called the seizure “a hostile act.” By Saturday afternoon, Britain had summoned the Iranian ambassador to register its protest, and a second emergency Cabinet meeting was set to begin.
The capture of the tanker — two weeks after British forces impounded an Iranian tanker near Gibraltar — sharply escalates a crisis between Iran and the West after three months of rising tensions that last month brought the United States within minutes of a military strike against targets in Iran. A fifth of the world’s crude oil supply is shipped from the Persian Gulf through the narrow Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, and oil prices spiked sharply on Friday even before the British warning.
But the next moves in the showdown over the tanker are likely to turn on the outcome of the British leadership contest, and the favorite, Boris Johnson, a flamboyant former mayor of London and former foreign minister, is famously unpredictable.
He has said during his campaign that he stands with the other European powers in their wish to avoid a confrontation with Iran. But Johnson has also risen through his party railing against Europe and has sought closer ties to President Donald Trump, who set the current cycle of confrontation in motion by attempting to squeeze Iran into renegotiating a 2015 nuclear accord with world powers.
That has increased speculation that the clash over the tanker may move Britain out of its current opposition to Trump over his feud with Iran. Britain has so far stood with the other European powers seeking to defy the president and preserve the accord. “There has to come a moment where the British government, and maybe France and Germany ask, ‘Is it really worth fighting Trump on all these fronts?’ ” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London research institute.
Setting the stage for a prolonged standoff, Iranian news agencies reported on Saturday that all 23 crew members of the British-flagged tanker would be held onboard in Iran’s Bandar Abbas Port during a criminal investigation of the ship’s actions.
None of the crew members is British or American. Iranian news agencies said their nationalities included Indian, Russian, Latvian and Filipino, but 18, including the ship’s captain, were Indian.
A spokesman for the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said it had contacted Iran “to secure the early release and repatriation of Indian nationals,” the Indian newspaper the Hindu reported.
Iran’s powerful Guardian Council, which oversees major foreign policy decisions, sought on Saturday to justify the seizure as “reciprocal action” after British forces had impounded the Iranian tanker near Gibraltar.
“The rule of reciprocal action is well known in international law,” the spokesman, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, said, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.
But other Iranian authorities on Saturday added other rationales for the seizure of the ship, saying for the first time that the vessel had been involved in an accident with an Iranian fishing boat and that the tanker had ignored distress calls.