Iran said a British-flagged tanker it seized in July on alleged maritime violations is free to leave, ending a monthslong standoff with the U.K. ahead of a United Nations summit this week where it faces tough questions over attacks on rival Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.
Iranian forces commandeered the Stena Impero on accusations that it broke international maritime rules in the region. That came two weeks after Iran threatened to retaliate against the U.K. for impounding an Iranian tanker in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar in early July.
U.K. authorities said the Iranian tanker, now called the Adrian Darya 1, was held for carrying oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions. Iran denied that, but indicated it would release the Stena Impero only after its own vessel reached its destination. U.S. and U.K. officials have said the Adrian Darya 1 unloaded its crude to Syria despite Iranian assurances. Tehran has said the oil was sold to a third party but gave no details.
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“The legal process has finished and based on that the conditions for letting the oil tanker go free have been fulfilled and the oil tanker can move,” Ali Rabiei, Iran’s government spokesman, said Monday, according to the official IRNA news agency.
Allahmorad Afifipour, the head of the Ports and Maritime Organisation of Iran in Hormozgan Province, said the ship would soon leave the port of Bandar Abbas and head to international waters.
A spokesman for the Swedish owners of the Stena Impero said Monday Iranian authorities hadn’t notified the company that the tanker was free to leave. The “vessel is still being held,” he said.
However, Stena Bulk Chief Executive Erik Hanell had told a Swedish public broadcaster late Sunday that the company had received information that its tanker would be released soon. “So we understand that the political decision to release the ship has been taken,” he said.
A British Foreign Office official said it was monitoring the situation closely.
“We continue to call on Iran to immediately release the Stena Impero and her remaining crew, who continue to be illegally detained,” the foreign office said in a statement.
The tanker crisis soured relations between Iran and the U.K. as the Trump administration pressures European allies to join its maximum-pressure campaign to isolate Tehran. The U.S. imposed crippling economic sanctions on Iran after withdrawing from the 2015 multilateral nuclear accord last year. But the European countries have worked to keep the deal alive.
The U.K.’s new government, despite seeking close ties with the Trump administration, has continued to stand by the agreement, with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab repeatedly saying the accord serves Europe’s security interests.
But tensions in the region escalated after drone and missile attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities earlier this month took out half the kingdom’s production. U.S. officials blamed Iran for the attacks, and Washington is seeking to build an international coalition to exert pressure on Tehran. The U.N.’s General Assembly—for which world leaders including President Trump and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are gathering—could provide a critical forum for the Trump administration’s attempts.
European countries haven’t blamed Iran for the Saudi attacks, stressing that time is needed to unearth all the facts. But they also have cast doubt on claims from Yemen’s Houthi rebels that they were behind them.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif is expected to meet the remaining parties to the nuclear deal—Germany, France, U.K., China and Russia—on Wednesday. He and Mr. Rouhani also will hold bilateral talks during the summit.
Before the Stena Impero’s release, the U.K. had said it would raise the issue at the U.N. summit.
The strikes in Saudi Arabia and the British-flagged vessel’s seizure come after several attacks on commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman, which the U.S. accused Iran of orchestrating. Tehran denied the allegation. The incidents compounded the risk for commercial shipping in the region, raising shipping premiums and pushing some vessel owners to avoid the region.
The U.K., meanwhile, sent a second warship to protect British vessels in the area and said it would join a U.S.-led coalition to protect maritime traffic there.
The standoff weighed on European efforts to provide Iran with relief from economic sanctions and salvage the nuclear deal. Tehran in recent months has breached some of the deal’s terms after accusing the European parties—the U.K., Germany and France—of not doing enough to ensure Iran got the economic benefits it was from promised for curtailing its nuclear activities.
Diplomatic relations between the U.K. and Iran have been further strained by the Islamic Republic’s detention of several British-Iranians in its notorious Evin Prison. Iran has held charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe since 2016 and recently arrested anthropologist Kameel Ahmady. It also in July arrested another European dual-national, French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, on unspecified charges.
U.S. sanctions have hit the Iranian industries hard, particularly oil exports, which Washington says it wants to slash to zero.
The seizure of the Iranian oil by Gibraltar was particularly damaging, as Iran’s oil exports have fallen as low as 200,000 barrels a day, mostly to China and Syria, compared with 2.5 million barrels a day before the latest round of sanctions.
To that extent, the Iranian tanker’s release from Gibraltar was a setback for the U.S.’s attempts to enforce American sanctions in international maritime waters.
Iran and the U.K. didn’t say if the release of the British-flagged vessel was linked to the Iranian tanker’s freedom. But Iranian officials have previously indicated such a move would help end the detention of the Stena Impero.
The seizure of the Iranian tanker also infuriated many Iranians who saw in it a historical echo of London’s attempts to dominate Iranian oil, especially its efforts to block a nationalization of it in the 1950s, which led to the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected prime minister.
—Benoit Faucon in London, Laurence Norman and Costas Paris in New York and Aresu Eqbali in Tehran contributed to this article.
Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-frees-a-british-tanker-to-end-standoff-ahead-of-u-n-summit-11569232269
2019-09-23 11:26:00Z
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