IRGC says it hit Togo-flagged tanker Trend in Hormuz; UKMTO reports a projectile fire

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy said it struck the Togo-flagged oil tanker Trend in the Strait of Hormuz after what Tehran called an illegal transit. Rear Admiral Ali Ozmaei, the IRGC Navy commander, said in a statement carried by IRNA in the early hours of Friday, 18 September, that the ship had tried to cross outside Iran’s approved routing, that Guard units fired, and that a fire forced the vessel to stop.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations centre separately reported a security incident and said a ship about 16 nautical miles northeast of Khasab, Oman, was hit by an unknown projectile. The fire, UKMTO said, was later extinguished. It did not name the Trend. It is not confirmed in public that the two reports describe the same hull. Shipping desks are treating them as the same night in the same waterway.

Splash 247 identified the Trend as a 7,119 deadweight-tonne product tanker. That is a small ship by crude-export standards. It is large enough to burn and to close a lane while firefighting boats work.

The permission system Iran says it is enforcing

Since the wider war that began around 28 February, Tehran has said commercial ships may use the strait only on routes it designates and only after coordinating with the IRGC Navy. Ozmaei said the Trend moved at the urging of the US military. That claim is Iranian state language. What can be checked is the pattern. Vessels that ignore IRGC instructions have been turned back, boarded or hit through the summer. The International Maritime Organization has now verified 80 attacks on merchant ships in and around the strait since 28 February.

Thomas Kazakos, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Shipping, told the UN Security Council this week that straits cannot become places where commercial ships must obtain permission or accept arbitrary restrictions because tensions have risen. India has told the Council that navigational rights must not be subject to coercion. Those sentences are the legal counter to Ozmaei’s warning that unauthorised transit will end in the destruction of the offending ship.

The United States is running a counter-blockade of Iranian ports and has redirected merchant traffic. One Saturday report put the number of redirected vessels at 105. WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has already called the Hormuz disruption the worst shock to trade in 80 years. A 7,119 dwt product tanker on fire does not by itself prove that claim. It adds one more incident to the IMO’s count of 80.

What is still unknown

Ownership, cargo, insurer and the present location of the Trend have not been published in a form that can be checked from open registries in the first day. Casualty lists have not been released. Whether the ship is detained in Iranian waters or drifting under its own power is also unverified outside the IRGC statement.

The durable fact is the rule-set. Iran says passage is licensed. Maritime law and the ICS say it is not. Each new projectile tests which rule shipowners obey.