Bradley Martin, senior researcher at the US defence think tank RAND Corporation, told us the ship was likely “responding to some set of directions from Iran”.<\/p>\n
He says its path could indicate the presence of mines, or an effort by Iranian officials to make the ship easier to identify.<\/p>\n
By forcing vessels to reroute, ships are entering Iran’s territorial waters and Tehran’s maritime rules, says Michelle Wiese Bockmann from Windward Maritime Analytics.<\/p>\n
“My takeaway is that Iran is closing and controlling the strait by the fear of attack and also the fear of mining.<\/p>\n
“That’s why everyone is having to go around and hug its territorial coastline instead of going through that international navigation channel,” she told BBC Verify.<\/p>\n
Michael Connell from the US-based Center for Naval Analyses agrees that ships are taking a different route.<\/p>\n
“They probably have some agreement in place with Iranian authorities that if they stick to a defined lane they’re safe.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bradley Martin, senior researcher at the US defence think tank RAND Corporation, told us the ship was likely…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-485135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}