YankeeFan
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- Nov 19, 2004
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Nice timing:
The crews of two small United States Navy patrol boats were picked up by the Iranian authorities in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after commanders lost contact with the vessels, and Pentagon officials said that Iran had agreed to return the sailors soon.
An official said that the boats appeared to have drifted into Iranian territorial waters after one of them experienced mechanical problems. The boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when contact was lost late in the afternoon, a Defense Department official said.
The Pentagon said they had been on a routine training mission, but those waters are a frequent location for intelligence collection by the United States, Iran and many Gulf countries. A senior military official said he expected the sailors to remain held overnight and be released on Wednesday.
The detention of the 10 sailors comes at a particularly delicate moment in the tense American-Iranian relationship, just days before the formal implementation of a nuclear deal in which the United States is supposed to unfreeze about $100 billion in Iranian assets in return for the disablement of critical nuclear facilities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/world/middleeast/iran-holds-us-navy-boats-crew.html?_r=0
The crews of two small United States Navy patrol boats were picked up by the Iranian authorities in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday after commanders lost contact with the vessels, and Pentagon officials said that Iran had agreed to return the sailors soon.
An official said that the boats appeared to have drifted into Iranian territorial waters after one of them experienced mechanical problems. The boats were moving between Kuwait and Bahrain when contact was lost late in the afternoon, a Defense Department official said.
The Pentagon said they had been on a routine training mission, but those waters are a frequent location for intelligence collection by the United States, Iran and many Gulf countries. A senior military official said he expected the sailors to remain held overnight and be released on Wednesday.
The detention of the 10 sailors comes at a particularly delicate moment in the tense American-Iranian relationship, just days before the formal implementation of a nuclear deal in which the United States is supposed to unfreeze about $100 billion in Iranian assets in return for the disablement of critical nuclear facilities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/world/middleeast/iran-holds-us-navy-boats-crew.html?_r=0
