“The American Marines now have control of the ship,” assured Donald Trump.
The US Navy opened fire on an Iranian cargo ship attempting to break the US blockade of Iranian ports and then boarded it, Donald Trump stated on Sunday, April 19.
The Iranian-flagged cargo ship Touska “attempted to cross our maritime blockade, and it did not end well for them,” the US president wrote on his Truth Social network. A US destroyer intercepted the cargo ship “in the Gulf of Oman and ordered it to stop,” but the crew refused to obey,
so the warship immobilized it by firing at the engine room, and “the American Marines now have control of the ship,”
according to Donald Trump.
The US Central Command for the Middle East, Centcom, stated that it had ordered the crew of the ship to evacuate the engine room before damaging its propulsion system with several rounds of shells. Marines then boarded the ship, “which remains under American control,” the statement said.
The Touska is subject to sanctions from the US Treasury, Donald Trump emphasized. According to the Marine Traffic website, the container ship Touska, which departed from Malaysia on April 12, was approximately 45 km from the extreme south of the Iranian coast near the city of Chabahar, about six hours before Donald Trump’s announcement.
“The armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will soon retaliate and take retaliatory measures against this act of armed piracy and against the American military,” the spokesman for the Iranian general staff wrote on Telegram. He
accused the United States of “violating the ceasefire”
in effect for two weeks since April 8.
The Strait of Hormuz closed again
“We express our concern over the forced interception of the ship in question by the American party,”
a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated at a regular press briefing, Guo Jiakun. “We hope that the parties involved will show a responsible attitude and strictly respect the ceasefire agreement, avoid any escalation of tensions, and create the necessary conditions for the resumption of normal transit through the Strait of Hormuz,” he said.
Since the US blockade of Iranian ports imposed on April 13, “American forces have forced 25 commercial ships to turn back or have redirected them to a port in Iran,” Centcom reported.
Iran had lifted its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz on Friday,
through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas trade normally passes, but announced on Saturday that it was resuming “strict control” in response to the US decision to maintain its blockade of Iranian ports.
In a previous post on Truth Social on Sunday morning, Donald Trump accused Tehran of violating the ceasefire, which expires in three days, by launching attacks on Saturday in the Strait of Hormuz, targeting a French and a British ship, according to him. A ship from CMA CGM “was fired upon yesterday (Saturday) in the Strait of Hormuz,” the French maritime transport group informed the
AFP
on Sunday.
