The attack dates back to the morning of March 1, but Basis (an assumed first name) remembers it as if it were yesterday. The sailor was aboard the MKD Vyom, one of the first ships to suffer a deadly attack in the Gulf of Oman during US and Israeli airstrikes against Iran.
Questioned by The Guardian, he agreed to return to the events dating from almost 10 weeks ago. “There were immense shock waves and a ball of fire,” he says. Everything went black. There was no more electricity. I looked up: flames and thick black smoke were cascading out. »
“We would all be destroyed”
The tanker, flying the flag of the Marshall Islands, was heading to Saudi Arabia from Amsterdam (Netherlands). Faced with the escalation of the conflict, the ship was ordered to stop and report any suspicious behavior… Until receiving a projectile, probably fired from Iran.
The impact destroyed the ship’s engine room. “Metal pipes, insulating blankets, tanks, everything was torn off… I said to myself: I am alive. I have to get out of here “, continues Basis.
His “beloved colleague”, Dixit Solanki, died in the attack at the age of 32. This oiler from Mumbai, India, got stuck in the engine room, and was found lying under metal debris in the engine room.
The situation then worsened when a second fire broke out and the fire spread through the rupture of the oil tanks. “If the fire spread and reached the hold, we would all be wiped out,” he remembers, before respecting the captain’s order to abandon ship.
“Leaving the ship, leaving a colleague prisoner in the engine room, was unbearable,” he regrets. We felt like we had failed. »