A Persian Gulf port seems to have seen an Iranian warship sinking before it even left dock.
Satellite imagery posted online purports to show the Talayieh on its side at a dry dock in Bandar Abbas, a port in southern Iran.
The incident comes just days after a YouTube video showed the warship on its side at the port’s main base for the Iranian Navy. The cause of the ship’s collapse was unclear.
The vessel is believed to be in its final stages of construction before it was fitted for launch next year. It was unclear what extent the damage caused and how much time it might delay the launch.
Little is known about the Talayieh, but The Drive reported it appeared to be a derivative of the Moudge class corvette design while Iranian media referred to it as an ‘intelligence reconnaissance’ ship.
It is the latest in a string of apparent accidents involving Iranian naval vessels after one of the navy’s largest warships caught fire and sunk in the Gulf of Oman in June 2021 and 19 servicemen died when a ship fired a missile on another during a training exercise in May 2020.
Planetscape satellite imagery claims to show the Talayieh at its side in Bandar Abbas’s dry dock, which is a port in south Iran.
Online images showed the warship lying face down in an underwater dock at Port, Iran’s major naval base. The cause of the ship’s collapse was unclear.
The Talayieh, as shown in this photo, was believed to be in its final stages of construction before it was fitted for launch next year.
Chris Biggers (Mission Applications Director, HawkEye 360), tweeted the Planetscope satellite image taken December 4. He is a specialist in radio-frequency data analysis using commercial satellite constellations.
The ship is shown on its side in Bandar Abbas dock, in an area that appears to be identical to the location where the Talayieh was photographed by Iranian media back in August.
It was apparently filmed upside down in the dock after the ship tipped. On Sunday people were seen hanging from the railings. Social media accounts claim that at least one person was injured in the accident.
The ship was reported by state media to specialize in electronic warfare, including the identification of enemy targets, creation false targets, and cover for other Iranian vessels.
This accident appears to be just the latest in a series of incidents involving Iranian naval ships. In June, one of Iran’s largest naval vessels caught fire and sunk in the Gulf of Oman.
After a failure in one of its systems during training, the Kharg (a cargo ship measuring 650 feet) caught on fire.
The Iranian military stated that all 400 students and crew members on the ship, which was built in Britain in 1977, were evacuated without any injuries. Firefighters attempted to extinguish the flames.
Iranian officials stated that they were not able to rescue the vessel, which was found to have sunk near Jask the next morning despite 20 hours of hard work.
After being burned for over 20 hours, the Kharg, an Iranian naval support vessel, was sunk in the morning close to Jask.
Iran said that the fire started ‘in one the systems’ on the ship at the time, but did not elaborate. This incident comes amid an array of terrorist attacks Iran and Israel have blamed on each other.
20 service personnel were wounded and 19 died when an Iranian warship fired on one of its support vessels accidentally during a Gulf of Oman training exercise.
A frigate named Jamaran was trying to strike a target using one of its Noor missiles, but it struck instead a Konarak support ship.
State-run media reported that the Konarak had placed targets for Janaran to hit, but was too close by one to cause the missile’s lock to be made.
In 2018, another Iranian Navy destroyer was also lost in the Caspian Sea.
Two sides were close to war in 2019, after a string of fires and explosions caused by oil tankers from Iran and Saudi Arabia connected around the Arabian Peninsula.
Iran claimed that the Konarak had been towing the target to be fired at by the Jamaran, but it stayed too close afterward – leading to the missile being locked on to the Konarak.