| Submit your comments on this article |
| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| How a tanker and its crew that 'disappeared' for 10 days ended up in Iran |
| 2020-07-17 |
| [JPost] After disappearing from the UAE anchorage, there it was, off Hormuz Island near Iran, several hundred kilometers from its last known location on July 5, where it had been for months. Last year Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com, noticed a mysterious ship off the coast of Lavan Island near Iran, appearing to take on cargo from another ship. It had turned off its transponder, making it harder to track. However, Madani, who runs an independent online service that tracks and reports shipments and storage of crude oil, found the ship through satellite photos on December 6, 2019. The same ship once again pulled a disappearing act, although this time at least 28 crew disappeared with it for ten days, only for the ship to show up off the coast of Iran and for the crew to appear back in India simultaneously. The ship in question is called "Gulf Sky" and it has been at the center of an international quest by the US government to stop Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from laundering money and breaking sanctions by using front companies to acquire ships and smuggle weapons, oil and other cargo. The story is so complex and convoluted that it spans continents, involves human rights groups that sought to help the crew stranded on the ship, and now involves an alleged "hijacking" that took the ship from detention off the coast of the United Arab Emirates to an anchorage several kilometers off Iran’s Bandar Abbas. To understand how we got here I spoke at length with Madani who helped piece together missing details of this tanker’s movements. Last year, the Gulf Sky was named the MT Nautic and had recently been sold. The beneficiary owner was supposed to be a company in Oman. It had a crew of 28 and a captain from India who was ostensibly operating it for a company in India. We know this from details later released by the human rights group that was involved. |
| Posted by:Frank G |