Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Abbas Araqchi has publicly stated that the victim of “maritime robbery” by British royal thuggery on 4 July, was not en route to Syria’s Baniyas Refinery, on the Mediterranean coast.
In a live press conference, 7 July, FM Araqchi stated:
Despite what the government of England is claiming, the target and destination of this tanker wasn’t Syria. The port that they have named in Syria essentially does not have the capacity for such a supertanker. The target was somewhere else. It was passing through international waters through the Strait of Gibraltar and there is no law that allows England to stop this tanker. In our view, the stopping of this ship was maritime robbery and we want this tanker to be freed.
The destination of the crude oil tanker is irrelevant; whether the Grace1 was in international waters or within Gibraltar’s joint sea with Spain, is also irrelevant.
The only relevancy is that British criminals unleashed their royal thugs — with its history of hundreds of years of colonial impunity in ‘might making right’ — on a legal ship which was had fulfilled the requirements of innocent passage as clearly described in Article VIII of the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea.
At this writing, the UN is as mute over the British imperialist breach of its charter, as it was over the terror attack on the Baniyas Refinery, 22 June, which could have resulted in ecological disaster, were it not for the quick response of Syrian technicians and engineers.


Sargassum, by the way, can be cleaned & used as fertilizer, or made into kelp supplements.
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Short video from Barbados, on turning the sargassum problem into a successful business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nkRU0-4Kf8