Tehran: Iran said Monday that the British-flagged oil tanker is ‘free’ to leave more than two months after it was seized in the Gulf.
“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,” government spokesman Ali Rabiei told a news conference. Ali Rabiei, however, did not specify when the Swedish-owned vessel would be allowed to set sail.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps surrounded the ‘Stena Impero’ with attack boats before rappelling onto the deck of the tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, July 19.
The vessel was impounded at Iran’s Bandar Abbas port for allegedly failing to respond to distress calls and turning off its transponder after hitting a fishing boat.
‘Stena Bulk’, the company that owns the tanker, said Sunday that it expected the vessel to be released soon, but did not mention when and took a cautious approach regarding the release of the vessel.
“We understand that the political decision has been taken to release the ship,” ‘Stena Bulk’s’ chief executive Erik Hanell told Swedish television station ‘SVT’.
“We hope it will be able to leave in a few hours, but we don’t want to take anything for granted. We want to make sure the ship sails out of Iranian territorial waters and then we will be in a position to comment, informed Hanell.
The ship’s seizure came hours after a court in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar said it was extending the detention of the ‘Grace 1’, an Iranian oil tanker later renamed the ‘Adrian Darya 1’.
At the time, Tehran denied the seizure of the ‘Stena Impero’ was a tit-for-tat move. A Gibraltar court ordered the Iranian tanker’s release August 15 despite an 11th-hour US legal bid to keep it in detention.
AFP