A U.S. Navy patrol boat fired three warnings shots at an Iranian Revolutionary Guard boat on Wednesday after it said it was being harassed. CNN was the first to report this. The warning shots were not disclosed yesterday when the reports of three Iranian ships were harassing a Navy vessel.
Iran’s Defense Minister Gen. Hosein Dehghan said on Thursday that “if any foreign vessel enters our waters, we warn them, and if it’s an invasion, we confront.” He mentioned that Iranian boats patrol to monitor traffic and foreign vessels in its territorial waters.
This comes after when on Tuesday, a U.S. Navy official told CNN that four Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats were conducting “high-speed intercepts” of the USS Nitze and said the incident was “unsafe and unprofessional.”
At one point an Iranian boat came within 200 yards of a the U.S. Navy vessel. CNN reported:
When it failed to leave the area after the Navy had fired flares and had a radio conversation with the Iranian crew, the US officials said, the USS Squall fired three warning shots. Following standard maritime procedures, the Navy fired the three shots into the water to insure the Iranians understood they needed to leave the immediate area.
In an encounter Tuesday, a US Navy official told CNN four Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps vessels conducted a “high-speed intercept” of the USS Nitze in waters near the Strait of Hormuz Tuesday, deeming the incident “unsafe and unprofessional.”
The official said two of the vessels slowed and turned away only after coming within 300 yards of the US guided-missile destroyer as it transited international waters near the Strait of Hormuz, and only after the destroyer had sent multiple visual and audio warnings.
This is just another event in a continually escalating series of events ranging from Iran taking U.S. Navy Sailors hostage, drones, ship harassment and more.
The Iranian boats that raced towards the USS Nitze on Tuesday ignored international law and ignored maritime rules of the road per the 1972 Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. Here is raw footage of the Iranian boats on Tuesday interfering with the USS Nitze:
We will keep you updated with the latest developments.
