A US submarine sank an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka on Wednesday, killing at least 87 sailors and leaving dozens missing, officials said.
The sinking came as the war sparked by a joint US-Israel attack on Iran continued to spread across the Middle East.
“An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo,” US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in Washington.
He called the attack “quiet death” and the first US sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II. “Like in that war,” Hegseth said, “we are fighting to win.”
The Sri Lankan navy recovered the bodies of 87 sailors from waters near the southern city of Galle, but 61 remained missing, police and defence officials said.
“A search is still on for the others,” a navy official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Earlier, Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath said Sri Lankan forces had rescued 32 sailors, many wounded, from the stricken Iranian frigate IRIS Dena.
The rescued sailors are being treated in Galle, where an AFP photographer saw the first batch of over two dozen bodies being transported into a hospital on Wednesday evening.
The vessel issued a distress call at dawn but had completely sunk by the time a rescue ship reached the area within an hour, leaving only an oil patch on the surface, said Sri Lankan navy spokesman Buddhika Sampath.
The warship was travelling after reportedly attending a military exercise in India’s eastern port of Visakhapatnam.
The attack was just 40 kilometres (25 miles) south of Galle, the local navy said.
Iran has not yet commented on the sinking. Tehran’s ambassador in Colombo, Alireza Delkhosh, was not immediately available for comment.
Sampath said Sri Lanka’s response to the distress call was in line with its maritime obligations. “This is within our search and rescue area in the Indian Ocean,” Sampath told AFP.
Sri Lanka has remained neutral and has repeatedly urged dialogue to resolve the conflict in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the powerful son of Iran’s slain supreme leader emerged on Wednesday as a frontrunner to succeed him as the US stepped up its military campaign against Tehran and NATO air defences destroyed a missile heading from Iran into Turkish airspace.
As new explosions rang out in Tehran, plans were in doubt for a funeral for the elder Khamenei, 86, killed by Israeli forces on Saturday in the first assassination of a nation’s top ruler by an airstrike.
The body had been expected to lie in state in a vast Tehran mosque from Wednesday evening, but state media reported a farewell ceremony had been postponed.
Two Iranian sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Iran’s slain supreme leader, was not in Tehran when his father was killed in a strike that destroyed the leader’s compound.
Iran said the Assembly of Experts that will select the new leader would announce its decision soon, only the second time it will have done so since the Islamic Republic’s founding ?in 1979.
Assembly member Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told state TV the candidates had already been identified but did not name them.
Israel said it would hunt down whoever was chosen.