By Jonathan Saul and Renee Maltezou
LONDON/ATHENS (Reuters) -A limpet mine may have caused a blast that damaged a Greek tanker sailing off Libya’s coast last week, the fifth such incident to hit commercial shipping in the region in recent months, maritime security sources said on Tuesday.
The Marshall Islands-flagged tanker Vilamoura had left the Libyan port of Zuetina on June 27 to head to Gibraltar with some 1 million barrels of oil when there was an explosion in the engine room, its Greece-based operator TMS said on Monday.
According to initial assessments, a limpet mine was a likely cause of the blast, four maritime security sources said.
A company representative with knowledge of the matter told Reuters that TMS was in no position to know what caused the blast until a full assessment of the damage was conducted once the vessel arrived in Greece later on Tuesday or on July 2.
The tanker’s last position was off Greece’s southern coast, ship tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed on Tuesday.
The ship’s engine room was flooded due to the blast and the vessel lost maneuverability, although it was able to be towed towards Greece, TMS added in a statement on Monday.
The vessel had made two stops in recent months at the Russian Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga and Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, according to MarineTraffic data.
“Investigations into the suspected limpet mine attacks on tankers all link to recent port calls at Russian ports, indicating a targeted threat to vessels involved in Russian oil trade, likely driven by geopolitical tensions surrounding Western sanctions,” British maritime cyber defence and risk intelligence company Dryad Global said in a report this week.
Western countries have hit Russia with waves of sanctions over its war in Ukraine and the Group of Seven major powers has separately imposed a price cap of $60 a barrel on Moscow’s oil exports.
Three oil tankers were damaged by blasts in separate incidents around the Mediterranean in January and February, with the causes unknown.
The incidents are the first involving blast damage to non-military vessels to have taken place around the central Mediterranean for decades.
A fifth tanker suffered damage from explosions when it was anchored in Ust-Luga port in February, which prompted divers to search for mines around Russian ports.
(Reporting by Jonathan Saul, Renee Maltezou and Yannis Souliotis; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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