Stranded, Killed, Forgotten: Indian Seafarers Caught in the US-Iran Crossfire

At least seven Indian seafarers have died in and around the Strait of Hormuz so far. Hundreds more are trapped.

At least seven Indian seafarers have been killed in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the US-Israel war on Iran erupted on 28 February, with the toll mounting sharply this month as Washington tightened its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

(Photo: The Quint)

In March, a cargo vessel carrying 29-year-old Jerin George and his colleagues sailed out of Dubai loaded with containers bound for Iran. By the time it docked at Khorramshahr Port, near the Iran-Iraq border, Israeli missiles were falling on the coast.

Jerin, an engine mechanic from Alappuzha in Kerala, tells The Quint,

"For 45 days, the 14 of us on board feared for our lives. I thought I would never see my father, my mother, my sister again. We didn't have enough food—the stock was meant for 15 days, just the time to sail from Dubai to Iran and back. When the missiles hit the port, we hid in fear, with hunger pangs."

When a brief ceasefire took hold, Jerin and other seafarers sent SOS messages to their company and to the Indian government. The company did little, he alleges, so the crew turned to Alappuzha MP KC Venugopal, who arranged their repatriation. They travelled overland from Khorramshahr to Bandar Abbas, on to the Armenian border, and finally flew home to India on 3 May.

"That journey alone took almost a week—on the bus, standing in long queues at the border, then the embassy shelter, the airport. Somehow, we made it back," Jerin recalls.

He is still repaying Rs 1.5 lakh of the Rs 3.5 lakh he handed an agent to secure the job. On a monthly wage of Rs 45,000, he is also still chasing a pending Rs 45,000 the company has yet to pay, despite repeated requests.

If Jerin's return counts as a happy ending, then since the start of the Iran-Israel-US war, many Indian sailors have had no ending at all.

Seven Dead, and Counting

At least seven Indian seafarers have been killed in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the US-Israel war on Iran erupted on 28 February, with the toll mounting sharply this month as Washington tightened its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

The first deaths came on 1 March, when an Indian crew member was killed aboard the Marshall Islands-flagged tanker MKD Vyom off Oman—a strike US Central Command blamed on Iran. The same day, two more Indians died and a third went missing in an attack on the Palau-flagged Skylight near the Musandam Peninsula. Another Indian sailor was killed on 8 May when a wooden dhow caught fire near the strait.

The sharpest escalation came in June, when the US military struck three vessels carrying Indian crews in four days.

The strike on the Palau-flagged MT Settebello killed three Indian sailors—deaths India's shipping ministry confirmed after the men were initially reported missing—while the 24-strong Indian crew of the Marivex and the 20 aboard MT Jalveer survived.

The killings triggered public fury at home and a diplomatic protest, with New Delhi summoning a senior US diplomat and demanding the attacks "cease and end"—days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the G7 summit in France.

A Death Aboard a Stranded Ship

The crossfire is only one way to die in these waters. On 11 June, Nishant Urthanathan, a second officer from Tamil Nadu aboard the Indian-flagged tanker MT Celestial, died of a sudden illness while the vessel was stranded off Oman. The Indian embassy in Muscat confirmed he died from medical complications and said arrangements were being made for the early repatriation of his remains. His body remained aboard the ship at Duqm Port as those efforts began.

According to a crew letter cited by Sputnik India, Urthanathan first reported persistent vomiting on 8 June. By the morning of 11 June, he had stopped taking food and water.

The crew said they administered medication and sought shore-based help through their agents and the US Navy before weighing anchor for Duqm, the nearest port.

That same account alleges the US Navy did not answer the distress calls and later withheld permission to retrieve the body—claims the embassy has not endorsed, framing the death only as medical.

Manoj Yadav, general secretary of the Forward Seamen's Union of India (FSUI), called it "an assault on humanity" by the recruiting agents and ship management who, he said, did not do enough to save the sailor.

The conditions aboard were grim.

Urthanathan's body lay on the ship for more than two days without proper refrigeration, and the crew resorted to packing it with bottles of cold water to slow decomposition—a desperate improvisation that carried real health risks for those still on board.

The FSUI and the ship's captain are now pressing authorities on four fronts: preservation of the body, its repatriation, support for the surviving crew, and a full investigation into the failures in the response.

Urthanathan is the latest casualty among a far larger trapped population. At least 562 Indian sailors aboard 13 Indian-flagged cargo vessels have been stranded in the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman for more than 100 days—329 west of the strait and 233 in the Gulf of Oman, according to India's shipping ministry.

The exposure is wider still: more than 18,000 Indian seafarers are employed in West Asia, and around 23,000 crew merchant, harbour, and offshore vessels across the broader Gulf—the region now bearing the brunt of the Iran-Israel-US war.

Following the Cargo—and the Paper Trail

To understand why Indian deckhands are dying off Oman, one must follow the cargo. Iran moves its oil through a "shadow fleet": ageing, opaquely-owned tankers that switch off their transponders, transfer cargo ship-to-ship on the open sea, and fly flags of convenience to disguise its origin.

These vessels haul not only crude but also LPG, high-sulphur fuel oil, condensate, naphtha, and even grey ammonia, moving hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian energy to buyers in China and beyond. It is Tehran's economic lifeline, and Washington has so far spent 2026 trying to sever it.

It is the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that writes and enforces American sanctions. Its core tool is designation. The OFAC places a person, company or ship on its Specially Designated Nationals list, after which all US-touching property is "blocked" and Americans are barred from dealing with it.

As per the '50 percent rule', the freeze extends to any entity owned half or more by a blocked party. Secondary sanctions threaten the foreign banks and refineries that transact with the named ships—its via these ships that a label drafted in Washington reaches a buyer in China or an insurer in Dubai.

The designations and sanctions have come in waves.

On 25 February, OFAC named more than 30 individuals, entities and vessels under Executive Order (EO) 13902, explicitly tying oil revenue to Iran's weapons programmes. The State Department then blocked a further 14 tankers under EO 13846, naming specific hulls by IMO number—VICSCENE, BENLAI—and the managers behind them.

In April, the "Economic Fury" campaign, as the US administration has dubbed it, escalated sharply: OFAC sanctioned the Chinese refinery Hengli Petrochemical, one of Iran's largest buyers, alongside dozens more vessels. Meanwhile, US forces began boarding and striking tankers outright—firing missiles into the control room of the Iranian-flagged Touska on 20 April.

This is where the documentary apparatus turns lethal. An OFAC designation is built from evidence—IMO numbers, satellite AIS tracks, logs of ship-to-ship transfers, ownership chains traced through shells in Panama, the Marshall Islands and Liberia. It is, in effect, an administrative finding: a paper case assembled to freeze money.

But, since 13 April, Washington has backed that paper with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and CENTCOM now cites blockade violation as grounds to disable crewed merchant ships with precision munitions.

Here lies the accountability gap that should trouble us. The threshold to sanction a vessel is documentary and, in principle, reviewable; the threshold to fire on one is neither. No SDN list distinguishes the Iranian state from the 24 Indian engine-room hands who never chose the cargo.

There is no published evidentiary standard before a missile lands, no due process, no appeal—only a CENTCOM press release afterward. A regime built for the ledger is being executed with the gun, and the bodies are surfacing in the Gulf of Oman.

Maritime law sharpens the unease. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ships enjoy a right of transit passage through Hormuz that no state may lawfully suspend. Under international humanitarian law, deliberately striking non-combatant merchant crews is illegal, and even sympathetic scholars doubt that enforcing a blockade can ever justify killing civilian sailors.

Iran's embassy in New Delhi called the US case against the Indian-crewed ships baseless—a rare moment for Tehran and the grieving Indian families caught in the crossfire.

A Timid Response, Even as the World Watched

And what about India? For a nation of 300,000 seafarers that markets itself as a 'Vishwa Guru' and a rising pole of global power, the response has been an exercise in smallness.

New Delhi summoned US chargé d'affaires Jason Meeks, and S Jaishankar telephoned Secretary of State Marco Rubio to say such lethal actions against commercial shipping were not justified. The reply was a public humiliation: the State Department said all ships "should immediately comply with orders from US forces" and that violations "will not be tolerated." India protested the killing of its citizens and was, in effect, told to fall in line.

Worse is the silence at the top. Modi, who has built a persona on muscular nationalism, has not publicly commented on the deaths—even as he prepares to clasp hands with Trump at the G7.

The contrast writes the indictment itself: a government that stages chest-thumping over distant grievances cannot summon a sentence for seven of its own workers killed at sea.

Congress' Rahul Gandhi accused Modi of listening to Washington "like an obedient servant," writing that days after three Indians were killed there was "neither regret nor apology," and that "a free country would never tolerate" such language. Priyanka Gandhi Vadra called the silence "shameful"; Jairam Ramesh asked whether the prime minister would even raise the killings when he meets Trump.

The failure is not merely domestic optics—it is global. A power that cannot protect the 18,000-plus seafarers it sends into the Middle East, or extract so much as an apology when they are killed by a friendly navy, advertises the limits of its diplomacy to every capital watching. Protesting deaths one week and shaking the striking president's hand the next reads less like statecraft than supplication.

And somewhere off Duqm, a second officer's body still waits in the heat for a country to bring him home.

(The author is an independent journalist and author of 'River of Grey Flowers'.)