MV Iran Deyanat - Mysterious Contents

Mysterious Contents

The IRISL, which owns the ship, has been designated for proliferation activity by the U.S. Treasury office, thereby freezing its assets and banning American trade with it, including food and medical supplies, in accordance with US sanctions of Iran. The US accuses the shipping line of "falsifying documents and using deceptive schemes to shroud its involvement in illicit commerce," saying the "IRISL's actions are part of a broader pattern of deception and fabrication that Iran uses to advance its nuclear and missile programs."

Though the ship carried industrial contents such as iron ore, other potentially illegal cargo has been surmised by the blog Long War Journal. According to Long War Journal (which as sources for its reports includes "Somali officials," "independent sources," and chiefly a man named Hassan Allore Osman, listed as Puntland's Minister of Minerals and Oil), some of the pirates who boarded the ship suffered a strange illness, which includes loss of hair and skin burns, and some pirates having died. The pirates tried to access the cargo on the ship, but the containers were locked and the captain and Iranian engineer from the ship's crew gave changing accounts of the cargo's contents. "That ship is unusual," the Long War Journal reports Osman as saying. "It is not carrying a normal shipment."

In addition, Director of the East African's Seafarer's Assistance Programme Andrew Mwangura told South Africa's Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship." Mwangura, however, did not name the source of his information, so it is not known whether he was referring to the Long War Journal reports.

Experts have said that the accounts of the illness sound more like radiation poisoning than chemical poisoning. "It's baffling," Jonathan Tucker, from the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said to Fox News. "I'm not aware of any chemical agent that produces loss of hair within a few days. That's more suggestive of high levels of radioactive waste."

In all, 16 pirates died from the ship's contents. Differing analyses have claimed that the ship's contents were planned to be delivered to Hezbollah or to al-Qaida groups in the Horn of Africa; ultimately, however, the ship berthed at the destination listed on its manifest, Rotterdam, unloading food and minerals.

It has been speculated that the ship's actual destination was Eritrea, and that its cargo was small arms and chemical weapons for Islamist anti-government rebels in Somalia. It has also been speculated that the ship was loaded with radioactive sand, which was to be released in the proximity of Israeli coastal cities, and blown ashore by the wind. Surviving Somali pirates said that the containers that had been broken open were filled with a "powdery fine sandy soil".