The military raid on Monday on the MT Hankuk Chemi was at odds with Iranian explanations.
Armed Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops stormed a South Korean tanker and forced the ship to change course and travel to Iran, the vessel’s owner said Tuesday, the latest maritime seizure by Tehran amid heightened tensions with the West over its nuclear program. The military raid on Monday on the MT Hankuk Chemi was at odds with Iranian explanations that they stopped the vessel for polluting the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, it appeared the Islamic Republic sought to increase its leverage over Seoul ahead of negotiations over billions of dollars in Iranian assets frozen in South Korean banks amid a U.S. pressure campaign targeting Iran. An Iranian government spokesman, when asked on Tuesday about the seizure, offered Tehran’s bluntest acknowledgement yet of a link with the frozen assets. “If anybody is to be called a hostage taker, it is the South Korean government that has taken our more than $7 billion hostage under a futile pretext,” spokesman Ali Rabiei said. Iran on Monday also began enriching uranium up to 20%, a small technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%, at its underground Fordo facility. That move appeared aimed at pressuring the U.S. in the final days of President Donald Trump’s administration, which unilaterally withdrew from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers. Later comments Tuesday by the head of Iran’s civilian nuclear program suggested Tehran’s current production of uranium enriched to 20% wouldn’t reach levels needed for a nuclear weapon for over two years, potentially giving time for negotiations under President-elect Joe Biden. An official at DM Shipping Co. Ltd. of Busan, South Korea, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to talk to journalists, offered details of the Hankuk Chemi’s seizure. The vessel had been traveling from Jubail, Saudi Arabia, to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates when Iranian forces reached the ship and said they would board it.
