US Submarine Torpedoes Iranian Ship Near Sri Lanka, Raising War Crime Questions

ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:

Much of the latest war in the Middle East has happened in the Middle East, as you would expect. But one of the war's deadliest attacks took place thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean, shaking a sleepy seaside town. And a warning - this piece contains descriptions of the retrieval of victims after a military strike. NPR's Diaa Hadid has the story.

DIAA HADID, BYLINE: Fisherman Anil Kumara unloads his catch at the fishing harbor in Galle in Southern Sri Lanka. Dogs bark at crows snatching sardines in silvery flashes.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOGS BARKING)

HADID: Kumara says it was a day like this when the war came to these shores.

(SOUNDBITE OF BOAT ENGINE RUNNING)

ANIL KUMARA: (Speaking Sinhala).

HADID: He saw men unload bodies from a Sri Lankan navy vessel. Their pier is just a few dozen feet away. They were the remains of sailors from an Iranian naval vessel, the IRS (ph) Dena. It had just left an Indian port after participating in a ceremonial naval exercise. But on March 4, during the peak of fighting between Israel and the U.S. against Iran...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: It is getting more and more bizarre. A submarine attack on an Iranian ship...

HADID: That's Indian broadcaster NDTV. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced an American submarine had fired a torpedo at the Iranian vessel.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PETE HEGSETH: It was sunk by a torpedo - quiet death.

HADID: That attack occurred some 23 miles of Sri Lanka's coast.

ANIL JAYANTHA FERNANDO: Immediately, we just intervened.

HADID: Anil Jayantha Fernando is deputy minister of finance. The Sri Lankan navy rushed to the site and retrieved the bodies of 87 Iranian sailors. They rescued another 32. The next day, Sri Lankan authorities allowed another Iranian vessel, the IRS (ph) Bushehr, to dock after sailors reported engine trouble. Fernando tells NPR that the government worried that the U.S. would interpret their actions as siding with Iran in the Mid East war. So Fernando says the president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, went to great lengths to communicate that...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT ANURA KUMARA DISSANAYAKE: We don't have any role to play in geopolitics, and we do not take any side. We are not a part of this particular war. Humanity comes first.

HADID: Humanity - in fact, that incident of the submarine torpedoing the Iranian ship has raised questions about war crimes. To be clear, international law scholars say the U.S. acted lawfully when it attacked the Iranian ship. But what isn't clear is whether the submarine crew alerted Sri Lankan authorities that they had targeted a vessel and that there were sailors in distress.

DONALD ROTHWELL: That's a critical issue that needs to be clarified.

HADID: Donald Rothwell is a professor of international law at the Australian National University. He says under the Geneva Convention...

ROTHWELL: There is a basic obligation to come to the aid of sailors who are shipwrecked or are in distress or are wounded.

HADID: The Geneva Conventions do acknowledge submarines aren't equipped for rescues, but the crew should alert authorities when there are sailors in distress. Rothwell says a submarine crew can sidestep that obligation if they're worried that calling for help might put their own vessel in danger, say, for instance, if it reveals their location to other combatants. But Rothwell says if the crew was not in danger and did not alert authorities that sailors were drowning, then they may have committed a war crime given the number of Iranian sailors that died in the attack, at least 87 men.

The Department of Defense did not respond to detailed questions we sent about the attack. Inside a pink-painted station at Galle, a police officer tells us when the Sri Lankan navy vessels reached the scene, the Iranian ship had already sunk. He says bodies of the sailors were found floating over a radius of about 2 miles.

UNIDENTIFIED OFFICER: (Speaking Sinhala).

HADID: The officer asked NPR not to use his name because he's not authorized to talk to media. He says he and some 40 officers were pulled in to help. It was the biggest mass casualty event he'd witnessed. It overwhelmed the local hospital more, which could only hold 14 bodies.

UNIDENTIFIED OFFICER: (Speaking Sinhala).

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Speaking Sinhala).

He says officers worked through the day and night to fingerprint the dead, take DNA swabs and ready them for postmortems. He says the bodies he saw were intact with some blast wounds around the legs.

Back in the Galle Harbor, fisherman Anil Kumara is taping up boxes of fish for market.

(SOUNDBITE OF TAPE DISPENSING)

He says he thinks about those Iranian sailors when he's out at sea. He says, "I'm a fisherman. I know a man in water is a thousand times more vulnerable than a man on land."

KUMARA: (Speaking Sinhala).

He says, "in the water, there's no one there to help you." Diaa Hadid, NPR News, Galle fishing harbor, Sri Lanka.

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