Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hati Buzad said on the 24th that Iran does not accept South Korea’s proposal to “political mediation” Iran’s seizure of South Korean tankers.
Hatibzad said that the South Korean tanker was seized for technical reasons of pollution of the marine environment and should not seek a political solution.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps seized a Korean-flagged tanker in the Persian Gulf on the 4th on the grounds that it “has repeatedly violated laws and regulations related to the marine environment”.
South Korean media believe that the arrest of the ship is related to the South Korean side’s freezing of Iranian assets in South Korea.
The U.S. government unilaterally withdrew from the comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear issue in May 2018, and then restarted and added a series of sanctions against Iran.
Affected by this, two banks in South Korea have frozen about $7 billion of Iranian assets since September 2019.
