Iran set to release British tanker Stena Impero

The British-flagged tanker seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards more than two months ago has been released, according to Iranian officials.

“The legal process has finished and based on that the conditions for letting the oil tanker go free have been fulfilled and the oil tanker can move,” Ali Rabiei, Iran’s government spokesman, said on Monday, according to the official IRNA news agency.

The July 19 seizure of the ship, two weeks after Britain detained an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar, cranking up tensions in the region in the wake of attacks on other merchant vessels that Washington blamed on Tehran.

The Stena Impero’s Swedish owners are yet to confirm the vessel has been freed from the port city of Bandar Abbas, but had said on Sunday its release was imminent.

The decision to release the vessel comes a day before a meeting between Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, and the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York.

Relations between the United States, its allies and Iran have been gradually more strained since Washington withdrew last year from a global pact aimed at reining in Tehran’s nuclear programme and imposed sanctions on it aimed at shutting down Iranian oil exports.