Six hours of warnings did not stop the Touska. A five-inch gun did.
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said the destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) found the Iranian-flagged container ship in the north Arabian Sea on Sunday, steaming at 17 knots for Bandar Abbas, Iran. American forces told the crew repeatedly that the vessel was breaching the U.S. blockade. The crew did not comply over a six-hour period, CENTCOM said, so the Spruance ordered everyone out of the engine room and fired several rounds from its 5-inch MK 45 gun into it, disabling the ship’s propulsion. Marines from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit then boarded. The ship, CENTCOM said, remains in U.S. custody.
Trump’s account
President Donald Trump announced the seizure on Truth Social, and his version was less technical. “Today, an Iranian-flagged cargo ship named TOUSKA, nearly 900 feet long and weighing almost as much as an aircraft carrier, tried to get past our Naval Blockade, and it did not go well for them,” he wrote. He placed the interception in the Gulf of Oman and said the Iranian crew “refused to listen,” so the Navy stopped the ship “by blowing a hole in the engineroom.”
He added that U.S. Marines had custody of the vessel, that the Touska was under U.S. Treasury sanctions because of “prior history of illegal activity,” and that the Americans were “seeing what’s on board.” Trump did not say how the ship was halted. CENTCOM supplied that detail in a post on X on Sunday afternoon.
Neither CENTCOM nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Department of War referred its questions to the White House.
How the blockade began
The confrontation grew out of a dispute over the Strait of Hormuz. On April 9, Iran said it would allow 12 ships a day to pass if they paid a toll of $1 per barrel in Chinese yuan or cryptocurrency. It also announced it had laid mines, while admitting it did not know their exact locations.
Three days later, on April 12, Trump answered with a blockade. “Effective immediately,” he wrote, the Navy would begin blockading any and all ships trying to enter or leave the strait, and he called Iran’s approach “WORLD EXTORTION.” He also told the Navy to “seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran.”
The Touska seizure came a day after two Iranian gunboats fired on a British tanker passing through the strait, which Iran declared on Saturday was under its “strict control.”
