Tanker “Davina” Seized with 1.9 Million Barrels of Iranian Oil

The tanker tracking firm TankerTrackers.com announced that the tanker “Davina,” which was seized by U.S. forces in the Indian Ocean, was carrying approximately 1.9 million barrels of Iranian crude oil.

According to the report, the tanker, now also known as the “Lenore,” loaded its cargo from Kharg Island on March 20 and departed Iran three days later.

TankerTrackers stated that after leaving Iranian waters, the vessel turned off its Automatic Identification System (AIS) and disappeared from public tracking networks for several weeks near the port of Galle in southern Sri Lanka.

The U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command had previously announced that its forces boarded a sanctioned, “stateless” tanker named the Davina in international waters. The tanker is also included on the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s sanctions list.

Reuters separately reported that the vessel, which has the capacity to carry nearly two million barrels of crude oil, was sailing with a nearly full cargo when it was tracked near the southern coast of Sri Lanka.

According to these reports, the Davina belongs to Iran’s “shadow fleet,” a network of ships used to bypass oil sanctions. The United States had previously sanctioned the vessel for its role in the Iranian oil trade.

This seizure is part of an ongoing increase in U.S. naval pressure on Iran’s oil transport network. In recent months, several ships linked to Iran have been intercepted or halted by U.S. forces in the Indian Ocean and surrounding waters.

Washington says the objective of these actions is to disrupt the financial resources of the Islamic Republic, while Tehran characterizes these measures as “seizure and aggression against its legitimate maritime trade.”