Three Indian sailors died aboard the MT Settebello in the Gulf of Oman. The US says they ignored warnings on an Iran linked ship. The vessel's operators deny both claims, and India has put a formal protest on Washington's desk.
Patnala Bhargavi's phone rang on the night of June 10. Her husband, Chief Engineer Patnala Suresh, was calling from the MT Settebello, a Palau-flagged tanker in the Gulf of Oman. "I'll come home safely," he told her. Eleven days before their 15th wedding anniversary, a US strike on the engine room killed him, along with two of his Indian crewmates, Aditya Sharma, 23, and Shivanand Chaurasia, 35. Twenty-one other Indian sailors from the Settebello were rescued.
Suresh had nearly fifteen years at sea, two sons at home in Visakhapatnam, and two nieces he was putting through school, his wife told the BBC. He had gone below to inspect a generator fault when the strike hit. He never came back up.
What India now wants, in writing, is an account the United States and the tanker's operator have not been able to give in the same words.
US Central Command said its aircraft fired "precision munitions" into the Settebello's engine room after the crew "repeatedly failed" to follow directions, in a statement carried by the BBC. Centcom framed the strike as part of a blockade of Iran-linked shipping, an operation that began on April 13 after Tehran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor that carries roughly a fifth of world oil and gas.
iOS Marine, the company that manages the Settebello, told the BBC the opposite on every material point. It denied any Iranian or Iranian-oil connection. It said no warning call, message, or communication of any kind was ever successfully established with the vessel. It said the Settebello had been stationary for about ten days and had made no movement or evasive manoeuvre before the strike.
Two accounts, in the same news cycle, on the same ship. Both are on the record. Neither has been independently corroborated, and the three Indian men who were in that engine room are not available to settle it.
India's response moved unusually fast for a country that usually waits before escalating publicly. The Ministry of External Affairs summoned the US chargé d'affaires in New Delhi. MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said India had "lodged a strong protest" and called for an end to "targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure." Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal publicly committed to bringing the three bodies home and called the deaths a "profound loss." The government line, in other words, is that Indian civilians on a commercial vessel were killed, and the explanation is owed.
The Settebello was not the only Indian-crewed ship caught in the same US operation this week. Centcom confirmed strikes on three vessels in the Gulf, all of them foreign-flagged and all of them crewed predominantly by Indians: the Settebello, the Jalveer, a Guinea-Bissau-flagged tanker whose twenty Indians were returned safely, and the Marivex, also Palau-flagged, whose twenty-four Indian crew were rescued before the hull sank. Centcom said eight vessels had been disabled and 134 redirected since the blockade began on April 13, according to the BBC.
The pattern of flags and crews is itself a story. None of the three ships struck this week flew the flag of the country whose nationals died. All three carried Indian seafarers as the labour on board. India supplies roughly a tenth of the world's merchant mariners, and Indian crews are over-represented on the kind of older, foreign-flagged tankers that move sanctioned or sanctioned-adjacent cargoes in the Gulf. That structural fact is the most reliable part of the picture, and it is the one most likely to outlast this particular news cycle.
The Forward Seamen's Union of India put the policy question on the record the same day. General secretary Manoj Yadav asked, in effect, how the US could plausibly have lacked information on crew nationalities, and said detaining a non-compliant vessel was a viable alternative to killing its crew, the BBC reported. It was a domestic labour-union voice, not a government one, but the framing matched the one New Delhi had already taken to Washington.
For the families, the policy question is personal and specific. Rajesh Sharma, the father of cadet Aditya Sharma, asked the BBC for an inquiry: "Who is responsible for this?" Ramji Chaurasia, the father of fitter Shivanand Chaurasia, last spoke to his son the night before the strike. Patnala Bhargavi is now planning a funeral that is also, by eleven days, a wedding anniversary she will mark without him.
Two specific things are still unsettled, and they are what India's protest is actually about.
First, the warnings. The US account is that the crew was directed to stop, and refused. The operator's account is that no contact was made at all. If the US can produce the radio traffic or the visual signals it says it issued, the strike falls inside a recognisable maritime-enforcement pattern. If it cannot, the question becomes what a US aircraft is doing putting precision munitions into the engine room of a stationary tanker that its own operators say was not moving.
Second, the cargo. Centcom's framing of the Settebello as Iran-linked is the predicate for the operation. iOS Marine's denial of any Iranian or Iranian-oil affiliation goes to the same predicate. AIS tracking data for the Settebello's previous ports of call and cargoes would settle it; none has been published.
What the three Indian families are owed is not an abstraction. It is a clear answer, from Washington or from the operator or from both, on what was in the engine room, what was in the holds, and what was said over the radio in the hours before the ordnance hit. The Indian government has now said, on the record, that the matter is not closed.