Two killed in an attack on a tanker operated by an Israeli company off the coast of Oman

Two crew members of a tanker operated by Zodiac Maritime, a company led by Israeli tycoon Eyal Ofer, have been killed in an attack on Thursday off the coast of Oman, the shipping company reported on Friday. The two deceased are a British and a Romanian, according to a statement from Zodiac Maritime released through Twitter, in which it was not ruled out that there could be more victims.

The attack suffered by the Mercer Street, a Japanese-owned, Liberian-flagged mid-size oil tanker is still under investigation, according to the company that manages it. United Kingdom Commercial Maritime Operations (UKMTO, for its acronym in English), a British entity that reports on safety in the seas, excluded that it was a piracy action, as had been pointed out at first, according to a statement cited by Reuters.

The ship was about 280 kilometers northeast of the Omani port of Duqm, on its route from Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) to the port of Fujairah (United Arab Emirates), when it was attacked, according to UKMTO, which did not provide further details. The Mercer Street It is now sailing to a safe destination under its own power, under the control of its crew and escorted by a warship of the V Fleet of the United States, deployed around the Persian Gulf, reported Zodiac Maritime.

On July 3 the Tyndall, a Liberian-flagged container ship heading from the Saudi port of Jeddah to the Emirati port of Dubai, belonging to Zodiac Maritime, suffered material damage while sailing through the northern Indian Ocean, in a missile attack that was investigated by Israel as a alleged retaliatory action by Iran. This occurred shortly after the Tehran authorities had denounced the sabotage of facilities of the Atomic Agency in Karaj, west of the Iranian capital, in an operation that bore the stamp of the Israeli intelligence services, to paralyze production of uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Israel suspects that Iran has reactivated the hidden naval war that both countries have been waging since the beginning of the year on the Middle East trade routes and that it has caused a chain of incidents in the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. The shadow conflict saw another episode in April, when another Israeli-owned freighter was exploited by adhesive mines off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Also in April, an Iranian vessel allegedly serving as a naval command center for the Revolutionary Guards in the Red Sea was immobilized in an attack that Tehran attributed to Israeli commandos.