After seizing Grace 1, Iran threatens West and Britain to reciprocate

Mahmoud Mohammadi

Iran has continued its escalating steps against the West in general and the British government in particular. An Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander has threatened to detain a British tanker in response to the capture of a giant Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar by the Royal Marines.

“If Britain does not release the oil tanker, the Iranian authorities will have the duty to detain a British oil tanker,” Iran’s Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezai said in a tweet.

Witnesses are not criminals

The Government of Gibraltar (a British executive authority in the Strait of Gibraltar) declared that it had stopped off its coast a giant oil tanker carrying oil to Syria despite sanctions. The British Prime Minister Fabian Piccardo said in a statement, “We have all the reasons to believe that the tanker Grace 1 was carrying cargo to the Banias refinery owned by an entity subject to EU sanctions imposed on Syria.”

He added that the law enforcement agencies and the British Royal Navy boarded the giant tanker in the morning, and with my consent the port authority and law enforcement authorities sought to involve the Royal Marines in the implementation of this process.

The Government of Gibraltar stated that crew members of GRIS-1 were being interrogated as witnesses and not as criminals in an effort to determine the nature and destination of the shipment.

Hasty response

In a hasty response to the British decision, Iran summoned Britain’s ambassador on Thursday to protest what it considered an illegal detention of an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar. “Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said in a tweet that Ambassador Rob Macker was summoned because of illegal ship interdiction.

Since 2011, the European Union has placed the Syrian General Petroleum Corporation on the list of companies subject to sanctions, as well as companies and other personalities close to the Syrian regime. In 2018, the European Union announced the extension of sanctions imposed on Syria for an additional year.

Washington and sanctions

European nations have taken a cautious approach since last year when the United States ignored its appeals and pulled out of a nuclear deal between Iran and the world powers that helped Tehran gain access to world trade in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.

Washington has tightened sanctions on Tehran over the past two months to halt all its oil exports, pushing Tehran out of key markets and forcing it to seek unconventional alternatives to selling crude.

The confrontation has taken on a military dimension in recent weeks, accusing Washington of attacking Iran in the Gulf and the subsequent overthrow of a US aircraft. President Donald Trump ordered retaliatory air strikes against Iran, but canceled them at the last minute.