JAKARTA - A ship using a false identity belonging to a ship that has been dismantled has started operating to transport oil believed to be Iranian oil, as a form of defiance against sanctions.
Arsenio Longo, founder of Huax, told The National, the appearance of the ship, which is called a zombie ship, marks the first time a ship has been used to transport oil to tankers off the coast of Oman and then exported since the Middle East war began.
The ship uses international ship identities, including images and names, taken from a ship named Jamal. Photos of the ship that has been dismantled continue to be used on maritime trackers.
This marks a new development in the tactics used by vessels to disguise their identities to cross the Strait of Hormuz.
Longo explained that after passing through the strait, the ship unloaded its cargo "possibly through inter-ship transfers to ships waiting on the Omani side and unable to enter the Gulf".
"The ships then transported the cargo to the final destination, without having to pass through the Strait of Hormuz itself," he said, launching The National (25/3).
"The zombie ship is a bridge that crosses the Strait of Hormuz checkpoint," he added.
Quoted from the New York Post, Huax is a German-Italian maritime intelligence firm. Longo himself is said to be a maritime intelligence expert.
The use of zombie ships to date has been seen primarily in the trade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil.
"This is something we've never seen before in this region, so for us it's very exciting," Longo said.
Further, he explained, by comparing the depth of the ship's hull, which shows how deep the ship is in the water, transmitted by the Automatic Identification System (AIS), he concluded that the ship had lowered the cargo, which was most likely oil, off the coast of Oman.
"Such transfers, in significant volumes, carried out while berthed or through inter-ship transfers in open berthing areas, are in line with crude oil products," he explained.
The same data showed that the ballast water had been loaded into the ship's tanks and the ship was returning through the Strait of Hormuz in what Longo called a "structured shuttle operation".
Data shared with The National by Huax shows the Zombie vessel sailed to an anchorage area in open waters off the coast of Oman across from Sohar Port and unloaded its cargo between March 21 and 23.
The latest position on the Vessel Finder ship tracker showed the vessel crossing the Strait of Hormuz, with a route to the Iranian city of Bandar Abbas, close to the location of the oil terminal.
"What makes this a round trip operation and not a one-way operation is that the ship is now coming back, probably to load again," Longo said.
"A zombie ship that travels repeatedly through Hormuz, unloading the cargo in the Sohar area through what our broader set of data shows as a ship-to-ship transfer zone, and back to reload," he said.
He stressed that Huax had not picked up an AIS signal that could definitively pinpoint the ship's starting point, but he added "the assumption is that it is an Iranian port."
A zombie ship is a ship that broadcasts the unique International Maritime Organization (IMO) registration number, name, call sign, and flag of another ship that has been decommissioned or inactive via its AIS.
IMO numbers are the primary identifiers used by port state control authorities, sanction screening systems, insurance underwriters, and compliance databases.
By broadcasting a clean IMO number, a zombie ship can pass automated checks that would otherwise reveal its true identity.
"The identity of the zombie was successful precisely because no one checked the physical ship against the digital records in real time," he explained.
Longo said the zombie ship took the identity of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker, which he said also marked a new development and was a new tactic to avoid sanctions in the Strait of Hormuz.
"Ships broadcasting IMO numbers of LNG carriers that are not included in the sanctions list will pass most of the automated checks without triggering manual review," Longo said.
"The use of LNG carrier identity to cross Hormuz is the first known example of this technique being applied specifically to obtain permission to cross Hormuz," he added.
Previously, the use of zombie ships emerged in April last year as a way for operators to transport oil from Venezuela, which is under US sanctions.
This tactic is rooted in the use of dark fleets, namely tankers without insurance, to avoid sanctions. These ships use methods such as turning off AIS tracking, often changing ownership, and transferring between ships to hide the origin of the oil.
The first reported zombie ship, Varada, arrived in Malaysia after a two-month journey from Venezuela. Further investigation revealed that it was a ship that was dismantled in Bangladesh in 2017.
The actual Jamal ship was built in Japan in 2020 and the former operator Resurgence Ship Management, based in Mumbai, India, confirmed that the ship had been dismantled at the Alang shipyard in India. Videos show the moment of his arrival there in October last year.
Resurgence Ship Management told The National: "We are not aware of any other party using the same name and IMO number, but what is certain is that the ship has been scrapped. We no longer have any relationship with this ship."
It is known that the Middle East region is heating up along with the Israeli and US attacks on Iran on February 28, which have killed more than 1,300 people to date, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran has retaliated with drone and missile attacks targeting Israel, Jordan, Iraq, and Gulf states hosting US military assets. Iran has also effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz since early March.
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