USA sailors straying into Iranian waters was a “mistake”, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Thursday, noting that a “navigation error” was ultimately to blame.
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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”.
The Iranian regime detained 10 United States sailors to publicly embarrass America, according to retired Navy Capt. Chuck Nash.
Iran released a set of videos of USA sailors who were released Wednesday after being captured and detained overnight, raising questions about whether the country’s hard-line military force mistreated the Americans or violated worldwide law by using them for propaganda purposes. The sailors were then taken ashore by a U.S. Navy aircraft while another group of sailors took over the Riverine Command boats as they made their way towards the boats’ original destination, Bahrain.
The crew members were aboard two small patrol vessels in global waters in the Persian Gulf Tuesday when one of the boats developed a mechanical issue and drifted beyond the Iranian boundary.
In the footage, filmed before the sailors were released on Wednesday, the sailor says: “It was a mistake”.
“(I am) happy to see dialog and respect, not threats and impetuousness, swiftly resolved the (US) sailors’ episode”, Zarif said in a post in his Twitter account.
Carter also said it was “not abnormal” for the Iranian military to board the US boats because they were in Iran’s waters. “Whether or not there are singular pieces of equipment missing, we’ll determine that once we’ve completed the inventory”, he said.
Farsi Island is home to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps naval base, which may be why the sailors were quickly detained, Matthew Kroenig, a senior fellow in The Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, told VOA Tuesday. They know they can humiliate us.
Iran contends the sailors were attempting to snoop on a revolutionary base located on Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf.
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The 10 sailors were back with their American fleet on January 15.
