COLOMBO: Sri Lankan authorities on Wednesday rescued 32 severely injured sailors from an Iranian frigate that sank just beyond the country’s territorial waters, while more than 100 crew members are still reported missing, officials said.
The IRIS Dena, carrying approximately 180 crew members, issued a distress call at dawn before sinking about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the island nation. Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath confirmed the rescued sailors were transported to a hospital in southern Sri Lanka.
As per the Herath, who addressed parliament on the incident, the cause of the explosion that sank the vessel remains unknown.
Herath said that Sri Lanka deployed two naval vessels and an aircraft for the rescue operation, though he did not speculate on what caused the warship to sink.
A defence official expressed diminishing hopes for finding additional survivors. “We are keeping up a search, but we don’t know yet what happened to the rest of the crew,” the official told AFP.
An opposition lawmaker in parliament questioned whether the vessel might have been bombed amid ongoing US-Israeli actions against Iran, but the government did not immediately respond to the query.
Navy spokesman Buddhika Sampath emphasised that Sri Lanka was fulfilling its maritime obligations by responding to the distress call. “We responded to the distress call under our international obligations, as this is within our search and rescue area in the Indian Ocean,” Sampath told AFP.
The 32 rescued Iranian sailors were evacuated to the main hospital in Galle, located 115 kilometers (70 miles) south of the capital Colombo, where police increased security following their arrival.
Both Sri Lanka’s navy and air force declined to release footage of the rescue operation, citing that it involved another state’s military.
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