NEW DELHI—Iran said Friday Tehran and New Delhi are trying to resolve a dispute over an Indian oil tanker that Iranian naval authorities detained this week alleging that the vessel was polluting Iranian waters.
India had denied Iran’s allegation, with the country’s Shipping Ministry Chief Surveyor Amitava Banerjee saying that Iran had detained the vessel without “provocation.” State-run Shipping Corp. of India Ltd., the tanker’s owner, said Thursday the tanker, carrying crude oil from Iraq to India, wasn’t in the vicinity of Iranian water when it was detained Tuesday.
In a news release late Friday, Iran’s embassy in India said the detention “is purely a technical and nonpolitical issue” and that officials from the two countries are engaged in discussions to resolve it according to international law as soon as possible.
The tanker was detained following a warning from the Marine Emergency Mutual Aid Center, the news release said.
The Marine Emergency Mutual Aid Center is a regional Bahrain-based organization to fight marine pollution.
Earlier, Nima Pourang, head of the maritime-pollution department of the Iranian Environment Protection Organization, told the Fars news agency that the tanker had been detained because it discharged its oily ballast water 30 miles away from Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf. That discharge “caused a 10-mile-length oil stain on the sea,” he told Fars.
A Shipping Corp. executive said Friday the tanker, MT Desh Shanti, is now at Iran’s Bandar Abbas port. “I am very, very hopeful that the ship will be released as there is nothing wrong with it,” said the executive, who didn’t want to be named.
An Iranian port official, who declined to be named, said the Suezmax tanker was now being inspected at Bandar Abbas. It is accused of “discharging wastes, water mixed with crude oil near Lavan island,” which is illegal, the official said.
Suezmax tankers are midsize oil tankers capable on average of carrying one million barrels of oil.-Dow Jones
