Owner of Oil Tanker Saw 'Flying Object' Before Attack in Strait of Hormuz

The U.S. political and military standoff with Iran hardened as conflicting narratives about a pair of attacks on tankers near the Persian Gulf stoked regional tensions and President Donald Trump vowed that Tehran will not be allowed to close a key oil shipping lane.

With U.S.-Iranian relations already at a low point, American officials released images they said showed that Iran was involved in a mine blast that forced the evacuation of a tanker near the entrance to the Gulf on Thursday. Tehran denied involvement, and the owner of the ship refuted the U.S. assertion that the blast came from a mine, adding to the confusion over what happened and who was responsible.

“Iran did do it and you know they did it,” Trump said Friday during a phone interview with Fox News. “You saw the boat at night.”

While both sides have said they’re not looking for war, events have taken on a momentum of their own with U.S. and Iranian forces bolstering their military presence, raising the threat of a miscalculation. Even so, investors took the risk in their stride. Brent oil futures in London traded slightly lower on Friday at $61.15 a barrel, set for a weekly decline as concern about faltering demand outweighed those of Middle East tensions.

“I don’t think there’s any conclusive evidence that Iran was to blame,” Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at Energy Aspects Ltd. in London, said on Bloomberg Television. “Clearly political tensions are ratcheting higher,” she said, while cautioning that other groups in the region could also have carried out the attacks. “We just don’t have enough proof right now,” said Sen.

In a press statement on Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ran through a list of recent incidents the U.S. has pinned on Iran, from previous tanker blasts to missiles fired at a Saudi airport to a car bomb in Afghanistan.

“This is only the latest in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests,” Pompeo said. He referred to an Iranian threat in April to interrupt the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, the only sea passage from the Persian Gulf to open ocean and one of the world’s most important energy-transit chokepoints, and said that Iran was “now executing on that promise.”

“They’re not going to be closing it,” Trump told Fox News.

Senior Trump administration officials said earlier Thursday that the U.S. was considering a number of responses, including the possibility of providing naval escorts to commercial ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz. An American military response hasn’t been ruled out, they said, and all options are on the table.

Pompeo also said that U.S. efforts backed by Trump to get Iran to negotiate have been rebuffed by Iran’s leadership. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was on an “historic” trip to convince Iran to de-escalate and enter into talks, but was rejected by Iran’s supreme leader, who said he had no response to Trump.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani threw blame for the increased tensions at the U.S., saying Trump was using America’s “economic, financial and military capabilities as tools” in order to “destroy international rules and structures,” according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Friday.

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