IRAN (WRIC/AP) — The U.S. military says that 10 sailors briefly held by Iran are back in American care and “there are no indications that the sailors were harmed.”
The U.S. Navy issued a statement Wednesday after Iranian state media announced the sailors had been freed. It said the sailors departed the Iranian base on Farsi Island at 0843 GMT on the same boats that brought them there. It said the Navy would conduct an investigation into the incident.
The nine men and one woman were held on Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf after being detained nearby on Tuesday. The U.S. military has said that mechanical trouble with one of the boats caused them to drift into Iranian territorial waters near the island, where they were picked up by Iran.
Earlier Wednesday, Fadavi said the American boats had shown “unprofessional acts” for 40 minutes before being picked up by Iranian forces after entering the country’s territorial waters.
“US naval force and their frigate showed an unprofessional behavior and had air and naval moves for 40 minutes in the area,” Fadavi said at one point. He said Tehran did not consider the U.S. Navy boats violating Iranian territorial waters as “innocent passage.”
“Certainly US presence in Persian Gulf and their passage has never been innocent and we do not deem their passage as innocent,” he said.
Fadavi said Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif “had a firm stance” during a telephone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry “on their presence in our territorial waters and said they should not have come and should apologize.”
Kerry, who forged a personal relationship with Zarif through three years of nuclear negotiations, called his Iranian counterpart immediately on learning of the incident, according to a senior U.S. official. Kerry “personally engaged with Zarif on this issue to try to get to this outcome,” the official said.
The incident came on the heels of an incident in late December when Iran launched a rocket test near U.S. warships and boats passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Meanwhile, Iran was expected to satisfy the terms of last summer’s nuclear deal in just days. Once the U.N. nuclear agency confirms Iran’s actions to roll back its program, the United States and other Western powers are obliged to suspend wide-ranging oil, trade and financial sanctions on Tehran. Kerry recently said the deal’s implementation was “days away.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
