On Saturday last week, the Iranian oil tanker Humanity sailed through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore before veering northeast towards the coast of Malaysia, where it suddenly turned off its automatic identification system (AIS).
Satellite tracking data showed the 330-metre (1,083ft) crude oil tanker had arrived at the Eastern Outer Port Limits (EOPL) of Malaysia, a 1,200-square-kilometre (463-square-mile) expanse of water in the South China Sea about 70km (43 miles) off the shore.
Maritime security experts say the Humanity likely went “dark” as it was preparing to offload its cargo of Iranian oil in a ship-to-ship transfer to a waiting middleman. They say the cargo’s ultimate destination is likely China, which historically buys about 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports, according to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
For decades, the EOPL has served as an unofficial marketplace for sanctioned Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan oil, analysts say. Now, satellite data shows that EOPL activity has continued throughout the five-month-long United States-Israel war on Iran and despite a US naval blockade of Iranian ports that ran from April 13 to June 18 and resumed on July 14.
Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime security monitoring project affiliated with Stanford University, told Al Jazeera he has observed 62 ships broadcasting false or decommissioned ship identities since the start of the year while moving between the Gulf, the EOPL, Hong Kong and then onto northern China.
