oil tanker Illustration (photo: Shutterstock)
Now it’s official: the US Army’s Central Command announced today (Tuesday) that it found that the drone that attacked the Israeli oil tanker last week was Iranian-made. This is according to evidence collected by representatives of the US Navy operating in the Middle East.
According to the US Army’s announcement, Navy technicians performed a number of tests on the tanker after the incident, in which they collected fragments of the drone and samples of remnants of the explosive material that hit the Pacific Zircon tanker. The findings were transferred to the US Army’s laboratory in Bahrain, where they confirmed that it was a pole M from the Iranian-made “Shahad-136” model. This is the same type of UAV that was also delivered to the Russian army in the war in Ukraine and to the Houthi rebels in Yemen in attacks against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
A U.S. Navy lab in Bahrain has confirmed Iran’s connection to a Nov. 15 aerial drone attack on a Liberian-flagged commercial tanker transiting international waters in the #MiddleEast @US5thFleethttps://t.co/egcQX3AIGT pic.twitter.com/yOsSIQw3EO
— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) November 22, 2022
“The Iranian attack on a commercial tanker passing through international waters was deliberate, blatant and dangerous,” said the commander of the Fifth Fleet at US Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper. “It endangered the lives of the ship’s crew and undermined maritime security throughout the Middle East.”
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