I clearly didn't get the memo. Explain, please.
Gimme an hour or two to get to a real keyboard.
ETA:
On July 14th, 2019, a couple days after aggressively trying to stop the M/T
British Heritage (and being run off by HMS
Montrose) the M/T
Riah was finishing up a westbound Transit of the Straights of Hormuz when she slowed to two knots, turned off her AIS transponder, and then turned north towards Iranian waters. She subsequently dropped off RADAR. The IRGCN later released video of them seizing the
Riah in international waters. As far as I know without digging the ship and her 12 crew are still in Iran.
The
Riah is Panamanian flagged vessel (probably) owned by a company out of the UAE. The UAE has denied owning her since the seizure, and Panama recinded her flag a couple days ago. Iran claims, with some evidence, that she was smuggling gasoline out of Iran and selling it overseas. Gasoline is heavily subsidized in Iran, so you can make a tidy profit that way. They claim small dhows were meeting up with the
Riah and transferring fuel to her, then she would transfer it to other, larger tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Smaller tankers transferring fuel to larger tankers just outside the straights is not an uncommon practice even with legal cargos, but especially with smuggled petroleum.
So it's likely that this vessel WAS smuggling fuel, and Panama is too small, far away, and out of *expletive deleted*s to give about their flag, while UAE (with plausible deniability) isn't going to piss off Iran by making a fuss over it. Those twelve foreign sailors are probably going to spend a long time in Iranian jail unless one happens to come from a powerful country.
In contrast the
Stena Impero seems to be a much more straight forward tit-for-tat over the Brits grabbing
Grace 1 in the Med. The IRGCN claims they wanted to conduct a security inspection because she entered the SOH in the wrong lane, while transponder logs the UK released seem to show that she didn't. I pretty thin excuse to grab her. FWIW HMS
Montrose was nearby and tried to help again, radioing
Stena that she should continue on course and they were inbound but the tanker slowed and turned into Iranian waters before she got there.