Hi all. Long-time reader, first topic.
The Riesco, one of the five tankers hit on the 8th, was sailing as a Zimbabwe ship. Zimbabwe is landlocked and has no ship registry, so there’s no office there that could have issued her papers. Zimbabwe has told the IMO as much, that ships claiming its flag were never registered by it. Every story I’ve read about the strikes mentions the flag. None of them prints the numbers, so in case it’s useful: IMO 9251822, MMSI 679881006, call sign Z2B892. The 679 at the front of the MMSI is Zimbabwe’s country code.
The naming caught me off guard. OFAC designated her back in November 2025, and they have her as a Panama ship called AQUARIS. She’s been transmitting as a Zimbabwe ship called RIESCO, which is also what CENTCOM’s release calls her. So search OFAC for “Riesco” and nothing comes back. Happy to post the positions on either side of the gap if anyone wants to poke holes in it. I’d rather hear it’s wrong than not.
I run a small project that follows sanctioned ships on AIS, so her movements are what we have. We lose her in the Singapore Strait on 9 July and she’s gone 52 days, while we were still hearing a couple of dozen other ships in the same patches of water. She turns up at anchor off Khor Fakkan on 30 August, and our own last fix is the afternoon of 4 September, still sitting there. Vesseltracker has her on the 8th, the day CENTCOM says she sank, so the gap at the end is us rather than her. Fair warning, that page only shows the last seven days to anyone not signed in, so the July gap isn’t on it. Happy to post the positions on either side if anyone wants them.
The bit I can’t answer is the one you’d know cold. When a flag state tells the IMO the certificates were forged, does anything actually happen to the ship? Port state control, class, insurance? Or is it a letter and everyone carries on?
