Twenty-seven crew members aboard Iranian crude oil tankers anchored off Sri Lanka’s southern coast were brought ashore on Saturday afternoon after falling ill, and were taken to a private hospital in Colombo, the Daily Mirror reported on Sunday morning.

The account is attributed to the office of the Southern Province Senior Deputy Inspector General of Police.

The evacuation was carried out following the intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Sri Lanka Navy deploying two craft to carry the sick crew from the vessels to Galle Port. From there they were moved to Colombo for further treatment.

Why this matters beyond the medical facts

These are not vessels in transit. They are the empty Iranian tankers that have been anchored off Galle since August, and whose crews Sri Lankan suppliers have been unable to provision.

The ships unloaded crude roughly two months ago and have since sat just outside Sri Lanka’s 12-nautical-mile territorial sea but inside its Exclusive Economic Zone. The United States has issued a global warning against supplying them with food, water, medicine or other services, and Sri Lankan service providers stopped resupplying them rather than risk secondary sanctions. A later refusal was reported in October.

Eleven days ago, Iran asked India to intervene at the highest level to get food, water and medicine to those crews, on the grounds that Indian and Bangladeshi nationals are among them. Iranian Ambassador Dr. Alireza Delkhosh has argued that Sri Lanka cannot refuse the vessels’ needs, citing Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea together with the SOLAS and SAR conventions.

Two things have now changed. The crews’ condition has become a medical emergency rather than a diplomatic argument, and the Foreign Ministry has acted. Through most of this standoff the Sri Lankan government was described as tight-lipped; Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told the Cabinet media conference on 8 September that the vessels were in international waters and “not in our waters”. Saturday’s operation is the first reported instance of the ministry intervening to move people off these ships.

Update, Sunday evening: treated, and flown home

The crew members have been sent back to Iran. After receiving the medical treatment they needed ashore, the entire group departed for Iran, Foreign Ministry media spokesman Thushara Rodrigo said, Hiru News reported at 4.05 p.m.

That closes the episode within about a day, and it supplies the first named government source on it.

Two things in Hiru’s account differ from the Daily Mirror’s — and a later Daily Mirror filing has since resolved both in Hiru’s favour.

The number. Hiru put the group at about 40 sailors; the Daily Mirror’s first report said 27. The paper’s own evening filing settles it at 40, and the figure now comes from the minister himself rather than from a police office.

Who organised it. The Daily Mirror first described the evacuation as following the intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Navy providing the craft. Hiru described a humanitarian operation mounted under the full organisation and facilitation of the Iranian embassy in Colombo. The later Daily Mirror report confirms Hiru’s version: the evacuation was arranged and facilitated by the Iranian Embassy, with Sri Lankan authorities coordinating the transfer through the Port of Galle — and the embassy bore the costs of the operation.

On the vessels’ position the two still differ slightly: Hiru places them about 26 nautical miles beyond Sri Lanka’s maritime limit, the Daily Mirror about 24. Both are consistent with the position reported throughout this standoff — outside the territorial sea, inside the Exclusive Economic Zone.

The minister puts his name to it

Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath has confirmed the operation directly, the Daily Mirror reported at 6.17 p.m.

“We rescued 40 sailors, provided them with medical treatment and repatriated them this morning.”

That is the first time a Sri Lankan cabinet minister has spoken on the record about these vessels since the standoff began. Foreign Ministry spokesman Thushara Rodrigo, who gave Hiru the outcome, told AFP that Sri Lanka had met its obligations: “We have coordinated the transfer and carried out our humanitarian obligations.”

The same filing supplies two details no earlier account carried. Nearly a dozen empty Iranian oil tankers are reported anchored off Galle — the first published count of the fleet. And Sri Lankan defence officials say reconnaissance aircraft and naval patrol boats have been deployed to monitor the vessels, which establishes that the ships have been under active military observation, not merely tolerated at anchor.

The Daily Mirror also notes that the tankers have been unable to return to their home ports because of a US blockade, alongside the sanctions disruption already reported here.

One date does not reconcile. The paper states the sailors were repatriated on Saturday morning, 24 October, and glosses Herath’s “this morning” as referring to Saturday’s operation. But its own earlier report had the crew brought ashore on Saturday afternoon and taken to Colombo for treatment — which cannot precede a Saturday-morning departure. Either the ashore-and-treated sequence ran a day earlier than first reported, or the minister’s “this morning”, spoken to a paper publishing on Sunday, means Sunday. No filing resolves it, and the discrepancy is recorded here rather than settled.

The departure answers the question the standoff had been stuck on for two months — not by resolving the supply dispute, but by removing the people from it. The ships remain. No filing says whether any crew stayed aboard, or who is now manning the tankers anchored off Galle.

What has not been established

No filing gives a cause. The Daily Mirror does not say what the crew members are suffering from, whether the cases are linked, or whether the illness has any connection to the supply position aboard the vessels. The sequence is suggestive and the context above is a matter of record, but a causal link is not reported and should not be assumed — the filing identifies no illness, names no doctor and cites no medical authority.

Also unstated: the crew members’ nationalities, their condition on arrival, which hospital received them, how many of the roughly dozen vessels the 40 came from, and whether more crew remain unwell at sea. No account says whether this evacuation was treated as a humanitarian exception to the US warning, or how the Navy’s involvement was authorised.

The nationalities, the receiving hospital and the vessel-by-vessel breakdown remain unreported. The later filings resolve the question of the crews’ condition only indirectly — they were well enough to travel — and still name no illness, doctor or medical authority. Nor does any filing say who is now crewing the tankers still at anchor.

Sources