The Iranian government has accused South Korea of holding more than £5 billion of its money “hostage” in its banks, a day after its revolutionary guards stormed and captured a Korean tanker in the Persian Gulf.
The tanker, the MT Hankuk Chemi, was seized yesterday and escorted to an Iranian port under the pretext that it was causing pollution in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iranian officials.
But the ship’s owners have denied this and revealed the tanker was boarded by armed marines from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), suggesting that Tehran intends to use it as leverage in a dispute with Seoul over frozen Iranian assets.
Ali Rabiei, a spokesman for the Islamic regime, denied accusations of “hostage diplomacy” over the capture of the ship, which was carrying a cargo 7,200 tonnes of ethanol from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates when it was intercepted by IRGC speedboats and a helicopter off the coast of Oman.
“We’ve become used to such allegations … but if there is any hostage-taking, it is Korea’s government that is holding $7 billion (£5.15 billion) which belongs to us hostage on baseless grounds,” Mr Rabiei told reporters at a news conference streamed online.
Tehran has previously accused South Korea of being a “lackey” of the United States and demanded it release the money which it says it is owed from oil sales made before the Trump administration tightened sanctions on the Islamic republic.
The head of Iran’s central bank has argued that it needs the money to purchase coronavirus vaccines, and should be exempt from sanctions.
An anti-piracy destroyer of the South Korean Navy has arrived in the Gulf with 300 troops aboard in response to the seizure of the tanker and the arrest of its crew from Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam and Myanmar.
The foreign ministry in Seoul demanded the vessel’s release, but insisted it would seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis. It is now reviewing whether a senior diplomat will visit Tehran on Sunday as planned.
The incident comes as Iran stoked tensions with the United States, Israel and other western powers by committing fresh breaches of a 2015 nuclear deal designed to limit its enrichment of uranium, the raw material for a nuclear bomb.
It has also accused President Trump of “fabricating a pretext for war” by sending B-52 bombers to fly over the Persian Gulf.
The Iranian military started a two-day ‘large-scale drone exercise’ in the north of the country today, (Tuesday) unveiling new hardware including new unmanned “suicide drones” that are designed to hover over a battlefield before diving down to a target.
Iran has previously been accused of detaining ships and foreign nationals as a way of putting pressure on countries it disagrees with.
Prisoners include Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian mother, who is serving a five year sentence for spying, which she strongly denies.
Her family say her ordeal is due to an historic debt that Britain owes Iran over the cancelled sale of Chieftain tanks following the Iranian revolution in 1979.