Oman tows the tanker El Gaia after a Hormuz attack leaves two sailors missing

Oman’s Maritime Security Centre said on Tuesday that the Panama-flagged product tanker El Gaia is under tow to an Omani port after an attack in the Strait of Hormuz set fire to its engine room. Twenty-three crew members were taken off by an Omani naval vessel and given medical care. Two sailors remain missing.

The centre placed the ship 1.3 nautical miles north of the Musandam peninsula in one account and about 103 nautical miles northeast of Musandam in another, a discrepancy that has not been cleaned up in public briefings. UK Maritime Trade Operations logged a distress call and an engine-room fire after an unknown projectile struck the ship in the early hours of Sunday, 13 September, or late on the 12th. El Gaia is a 48,000-deadweight-tonne product tanker built in 2005, flagged in Panama and managed from the United Arab Emirates.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs said 14 of the crew were Indian. Thirteen of those sailors have been rescued. New Delhi condemned the attack on Sunday and said search teams were still looking for one missing Indian seafarer. That Indian figure sits inside Oman’s larger count of 25 people aboard, with two still unaccounted for.

The argument over what hit the ship is now a public quarrel between Tehran and Tampa. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Monday that El Gaia had tried to use a “forbidden” route south of the strait and exploded after striking naval mines. The IRGC added that the waterway remains closed and under Iranian naval control, a claim it has repeated since the war with the United States and Israel began at the end of February.

US Central Command called the mine story false. It said El Gaia was hit by an Iranian missile last month, left unable to move under its own power, and hit again by an Iranian drone over the weekend. “The IRGC’s false claim is yet another example of their lies and intimidation attempts while they try to impede commercial vessels in the strait,” CENTCOM posted. Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority, for its part, warned insurers, P&I clubs and classification societies not to serve ships on an updated list of “violating” vessels.

Fars, the semi-official Iranian agency, separately said “enemy drones” had struck two fishing boats overnight near Kargan, about 80 kilometres northeast of Musandam. That report has not been matched by an Omani or American confirmation.

The International Maritime Organization has counted at least 22 seafarers killed in 79 confirmed incidents in the Strait of Hormuz and the wider Middle East since the war opened. El Gaia is one more hull in that file, with the extra twist that the ship may already have been a dead-in-the-water target. If CENTCOM is right, the weekend strike was an attack on a disabled tanker. If the IRGC is right, it was a mine in a lane Tehran has declared closed. The crew, in either version, were still aboard.

For shipowners the practical map has two chokepoints at once. Hormuz is contested. Farther west, Houthi advances along Yemen’s Red Sea coast have tightened pressure on Bab el-Mandeb, the alternative some cargoes used after Hormuz became dangerous. Insurance premia, already high, now price both ends of the Arabian Peninsula.

Oman’s role is the one piece that does not depend on the quarrel. Muscat is towing the wreck, treating the crew, and running the search. That is the behaviour of a coastal state that still wants merchant traffic to treat its waters as a place from which people can be pulled out alive.

The next hard facts will come from the tow. When El Gaia reaches an Omani berth, surveyors will look at the engine room and the hull. Scorch patterns, entry holes and mine deformation do not look the same. Until those photographs circulate, the public file contains two official stories and two missing sailors.