[The Times], Oil pours into Red Sea after ‘rocket attack’ on Iranian tanker

An Iranian oil firm says that a tanker carrying a million barrels of crude to Syria has been hit by two missiles in the Red Sea.

An explosion was reported early this morning on a tanker belonging to the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). The vessel was off the western coast of Saudi Arabia, 60 miles southwest of Jeddah, at the time.

A statement said that two of the main holding tanks were holed and heavily damaged and that oil was reported to be pouring into the sea.

The oil tanker was identified by Iranian state TV as Sinopa, but the NIOC later said it was another vessel named Sabiti.

When the fire first took hold in the vessel there was no immediate apparent cause, although the Iranian fleet is old and poorly maintained, partly as a result of international sanctions, and two other tankers have got into distress in the Red Sea in the past six months.

However, the semi-official state news agency Fars then said that terrorist activity might lie behind the incident, and subsequently the company put out a statement saying that the vessel had been hit by two missiles.

That will raise suspicion that the explosion is an act of retaliation for Iranian military activity in the Gulf. Two Saudi oil facilities were hit by drones and missiles last month, which the United States and Saudi Arabia blamed on Iran.

The attacks were claimed by the Houthis, a Yemen rebel militia supported by Iran and currently involved in a vicious war in which Saudi Arabia and its ally the United Arab Emirates have been fighting on the side of the recognised government. The US and Britain, which arm both Saudi Arabia and UAE, believe that the missiles could not have been fired from Yemen and might have been launched from Iranian territory.

Tankertrackers.com, an online oil industry monitor, said that the Sinopa was carrying a million barrels of oil to Syria.

The US Navy’s 5th Fleet, which oversees the Middle East, said that it was aware of the incident, but gave no further comment.

President Trump has so far failed to order any military response to the attack on the Saudi oil facilities, which temporarily wiped out half of Saudi oil production, or more than 5 per cent of the world’s total.

Saudi officials are said to be concerned that all their oil facilities are vulnerable to attack. Mr Trump’s fear of getting sucked into a new war in the Middle East means that there has been no response to a rash of attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf — six of them holed by mines — the missile attack on Saudi oil facilities and others on Saudi airports.

Iran has called for the US to leave the Gulf and for all Gulf states to co-operate in providing “mutual security”.

Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, wrote in an article for a Kuwaiti newspaper yesterday that if all countries in the Gulf did not enjoy security “they will all be deprived of it”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/oil-pours-into-red-sea-after-rocket-attack-on-iranian-tanker-h8q2f825x