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Inside the Deadly U.S. Airstrike on a Shadow Fleet Tanker
Evidence suggests the ship on which three Indian sailors died was not moving when it was struck in the Gulf of Oman, but it had been engaged in risky offshore transfers of oil.
To the sailors recruited from India, it was just another job. But the ship they boarded was a shadow fleet tanker destined for a war zone.
The Settebello had spent at least five years moving Iranian oil that was under U.S. sanctions, often disguising its location, according to a maritime tracking firm. It hid again in early June in the Gulf of Oman, east of the Strait of Hormuz, where it loaded fuel from other ships at sea.
On the morning of June 10, it became a target of the U.S. Navy.
Shortly after 7 a.m., U.S. missiles blasted into the engine room where an engineer and mechanic had just begun their shifts, killing both men instantly. A young cadet, having breakfast next door, suffered fatal head wounds.
They were the first and only civilian victims of America’s blockade on Iranian ports — and among at least 17 sailors killed since the war began, according to the United Nations, most of them casualties of Iranian strikes.
Just how they became casualties of a war they weren’t part of offers a window into the dangers faced by merchant sailors in the Middle East, where fighting between the United States and Iran have made the waters in and around the Strait of Hormuz some of the world’s deadliest.
The U.S. military said it fired precision munitions into the Settebello’s engine room because it was violating the American blockade on Iranian ports and repeatedly failed to comply with directions.
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