A U.S. Navy sailor who was among ten briefly taken into custody by Iranian authorities Tuesday was shown on state television apologizing for entering the country’s territory.
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Thanking the Iranians for their cooperation, Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that “we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago”.
While the nine men and one woman sailor were not physically mistreated during their captivity, the latest news from the defense official is the first indication that they were under some kind of direct mental duress from the Iranians.
US officials had said on Tuesday that Tehran assured them the crew and vessels would be returned safely and promptly.
The sailors, on two riverine boats, had mechanical problems and the Associated Press reported one of the ships ran aground on Iran’s Farsi Island, which is itself a naval base.
“That’s how they believe they ended up in this circumstance”.
Commanders in the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the region became alarmed when the sailors missed a planned check-in call on their radios.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said the sailors were released Wednesday after it was determined that their entry was not intentional. He touted the incident as an example of US “vulnerability” in the Persian Gulf and praised the vigilance of the Iranian military, which monitors USA activities in the region. “It may be that they were trying to sort it out at the time they encountered the Iranian boats and discovered they were inside of the territorial waters of Iran”, Carter said in the interview, which took place in Miami.
A navigational error caused two US Navy vessels to stray into Iranian waters, Pentagon chief Ashton Carter said Thursday, as opponents of the Obama administration voiced increasing anger over the US response to the incident.
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“It was a mistake, it was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake”, said one of the sailors. A senior United States defence official told reporters in Washington that the sailors were not harmed, but would undergo medical evaluation and a debriefing in Qatar.
