The mystery of the made in Italy ferryboat that has become an Iranian warship
According to some sites specialized in maritime issues, the new Iranian warship Shahid Rudaki would be none other than the former cargo ship Altinia , built by Cantieri Visentini in 1992.
This ship, according to shippingitaly.it , was resold last year to Giovanni Visentini Transporti Fluviomarittimi for two million dollars. From here, somehow, this ro-ro ship ( roll-on / roll-off , a ferry ship) would have arrived in Tehran and transformed into a warship, presented to the public a few days ago.
This information is also confirmed on Twitter by Jeremy Binnie of Jane's Defense Weekly , who posted the comparison images between the two boats.
But if confirmed that it is the same ship (as it seems evident), how did it get to Iran? It is unlikely that we will ever have a certain answer, but public information on the web may perhaps give us some indication.
According to the ship2shore.it website , the Altinia ship did not only have this name. On the web, doing a brief search, it turns out that Altinia – when it was still called that – flew the flag of the Comoros .
Later, the ship changed its name to Galaxi F. Searching online, we learn that the Galaxi F. was already in Iran last August, as a cargo ship, and that after a 17-day voyage from the port of Isoico it had arrived in Singapore. From here, always following what marinetraffic.com reports , the ship should have returned to Iran, precisely to the port of Bandar Abbas. Unlike the Altinia , the Galaxi F. flew the Panamanian flag. The same site marinetraffic.com officially confirms that Galaxi F. was the ex- Altinia .
Again marinetraffic.com reports that the Galaxi F. has a length of 150 meters and a width of 21.6 meters. The same measures found online of the Iranian military ship Shahid Rudaki .
Finally, one last point: the Galaxi F. ship may have been converted into a military ship right in the port of Bandar Abbasi. Here, in fact, the Bandar Abbas Pars Ship Reparing Company is based , a company born in 2006 from the partnership between the shipping company Irisl and Isoico . Officially the company was born with the task of repairing large ships.
But Irisl is also a company subject to international sanctions, for its role in assisting the Iranian regime in the development of the missile and nuclear program. Here, then, is yet another case that shows how there is no business with the Iranian regime without the risk of finding oneself complicit in having exported dual-use technology to the Islamic Republic. The question now is who technically sold that ship and where the clearance for the transaction came from. Because whoever did it violated international sanctions.
The post The mystery of the made in Italy ferryboat that became an Iranian warship appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-mistero-della-nave-traghetto-made-in-italy-diventata-una-nave-da-guerra-iraniana/ on Fri, 27 Nov 2020 04:44:00 +0000.