April 26, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 19, 1429

WASHINGTON, April 25: A vessel chartered by the US military fired warning shots at two speedboats believed to be Iranian that approached it in the Gulf, a US defence official said on Friday.

The incident involving the Westward Venture occurred on Thursday morning “dozens of miles” from the Iranian coastline in the Gulf, said the official.

“A couple of fast boats got within a couple of hundred yards from the ship, and they fired some warning shots at it,” said the official, adding that the speedboats then turned away.

In Iran, state-run Al Alam television cited a source in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard navy as denying that Iranian boats had been in a confrontation with a foreign vessel.

“If shots were possibly fired, then they could have been shot at non-Iranian boats,” the source added. But there have been a series of such incidents reported between US warships and speedboats typically used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards to patrol shipping lanes.

This incident was unusual in that it involved a vessel chartered by the US military.

On March 24, however, an Egyptian was killed and two others wounded when military guards aboard another chartered ship, the Global Patriot, fired on boats that approached it to sell merchandise as the ship waited to transit the Suez Canal. A US navy official said the Westward Venture was approached by two unidentified small boats as it was transiting the central Gulf in international waters.—AFP