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Gibraltar rejects U.S. request to seize Iranian oil tanker, ship leaves for Greece

August 19, 2019 at 1:59 a.m. EDT
A U.S. district court on Aug. 16 made a bid to seize a ship carrying 2.1 million barrels of oil, saying the shipment breaches U.S. sanctions against Iran. (Video: Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

A Gibraltar court rejected a U.S. attempt to seize an Iranian oil tanker on Sunday, and the ship resumed its journey into the Mediterranean under the Iranian flag and with a new name.

The Grace 1 supertanker, renamed the Adrian Darya 1, had been anchored off Gibraltar since it was intercepted by the British navy July 4 on the grounds that it was carrying oil to Syria in violation of European Union sanctions. Authorities in Gibraltar lifted the detention order last week after Britain, which rules the territory, received assurances from Iran that the tanker would not take its cargo of 2.1 million barrels of oil to Syria.

But late Friday, the United States intervened, issuing a warrant for the seizure of the ship and its cargo, claiming it was violating not only U.S. sanctions against Syria but also those against Iran.

The Gibraltar court ruled that the American sanctions on Iran, which were imposed by President Trump after he walked away from the Iran nuclear deal last year, do not apply in the European Union.

The sanctions violations charged in the U.S. warrant “would not constitute offenses had they occurred in Gibraltar,” the government said in a statement. “There are no equivalent sanctions against Iran in Gibraltar, the UK or the rest of the EU.”

Late on Sunday night, the tanker left Gibraltar and sailed into the Mediterranean with a stated destination of the Greek port of Kalamata, according to the website marinetraffic.com.

Iran’s ambassador to Britain, Hamid Baeidinejad, also confirmed on Twitter that the tanker was underway.

U.S. seeks seizure of Iranian oil tanker in new escalation

Among the charges laid out in the U.S. warrant is that the tanker was facilitating terrorism because of the involvement in Iran’s oil industry of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is designated a terrorist organization by the United States. The Gibraltar ruling noted that the E.U. does not regard the IRGC as a terrorist organization. 

The court’s rejection of the U.S. request raises new questions over where the tanker will go next and whether the United States will attempt to intervene again, perhaps by forcibly intercepting it. No such action has been proposed, but Iranian media speculated that the U.S. Navy, which maintains several bases in the Mediterranean, might attempt to seize the vessel.

Iran’s navy commander, Rear Adm. Hossein Khanzadi, offered to dispatch the Iranian navy to escort the Adrian Darya 1, according to Iran’s Mehr news agency. 

The tanker had been set to leave Gibraltar on Friday after the court lifted its detention order, but the captain and five crew members quit, leaving the ship’s owners to recruit replacements.

Photographs posted on social media showed the vessel, painted with its new name and flying the Iranian flag, being readied for departure by men in orange uniforms.

It was unclear whether Iran would release the British tanker seized in the Persian Gulf in apparent retaliation for Britain’s detention of the Grace 1, as the ship was then called.

Paul Schemm in Dubai contributed to this report.

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