Iran’s top military commander says the release of the Iranian-operated Adrian Darya 1 supertanker, which was seized by British marines in the Strait of Gibraltar last month, proves the Islamic Republic’s power at the international level.
“The shooting down of an intruding US spy drone and the seizure of the violating British oil tanker and finally, the release of our country’s tanker in Gibraltar, prove the fact that the Islamic Revolution strongly continues on its path to achieve its lofty goals,” Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri said on Monday.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) in June shot down an intruding American spy drone over the country’s southern coastal province of Hormozgan.
The IRGC said in a statement then that the Global Hawk spy drone was brought down by its Aerospace Force near the Kouh-e Mobarak region — which sits in the central district of Jask County — after violating Iranian airspace.
A few weeks later, on July 19, the IRGC also legally seized the 30,000-tonne UK-flagged Stena Impero tanker, which had collided with an Iranian fishing boat and ignored its recurrent distress calls.
On July 4, Britain’s naval forces unlawfully seized the Adrian Darya 1 vessel, then known as Grace 1, and its cargo of 2.1 million barrels of oil in the Strait of Gibraltar under the pretext that the supertanker was carrying crude to Syria in violation of the European Union’s unilateral sanctions against the Arab country.
Tehran, however, rejected London’s claim about the tanker’s destination and slammed the seizure as “piracy.”
Gibraltar’s government said on Sunday that it has knocked back a request by Washington to detain the Adrian Darya 1 supertanker carrying Iranian oil.
“The EU sanctions regime on Iran is fundamentally different to that of the US,” the Gibraltar Government said in a statement on Sunday.
Source: Iranian Agencies
