Sri Lanka started to offload 208 crew members from a second Iranian vessel off its coast yesterday, a day after 87 people were killed and several others still missing after a US submarine strike on an Iranian warship in the same region.
“After detailed discussions with all parties, Sri Lanka has decided to assist the Iranian vessel,” Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told a Press briefing in Colombo.
The crew being offloaded included 53 officials, 84 cadets, 48 senior sailors and 23 sailors, Dissanayake said. Some crew members would remain on board to help the Sri Lankan Navy navigate the vessel to Trincomalee Port, he added.
The ship was near Colombo, in the country’s exclusive economic zone but outside its maritime boundary, Dissanayake said. “We worked on the stance that this is our humanitarian responsibility,” he told the briefing.
The first ship, IRIS Dena, was sunk on Wednesday, 19 nautical miles off Sri Lanka’s southern port city of Galle, and two freezers had been dispatched to store the 87 bodies recovered from the sea, he added.
Tehran has asked Colombo to help repatriate the bodies, Sri Lanka’s deputy minister for health and mass media, Hansaka Wijemuni, told Reuters.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said the warship was struck in international waters without warning, thousands of miles from the Gulf, where US and Israeli forces are striking Iran and Tehran is retaliating with missile and drone attacks.
“The US will bitterly regret the precedent it has set,” Araqchi said in a post on X, adding that the warship was a guest of India’s navy and was carrying almost 130 sailors.
IRIS Dena had taken part in a naval exercise organised by India in the Bay of Bengal from February 18-25 and was on its way back.
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