Indian Blood in the Gulf: Three Dead, MT Jalveer Also Attacked

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By TRH World Desk

Just a day after a strike on MT Settebello killed three Indian seafarers off Oman, another vessel carrying Indian crew members has reportedly come under attack near the Strait of Hormuz, deepening India’s maritime security crisis and testing its ties with Washington.

New Delhi, June 11, 2026 — Another commercial vessel with Indian sailors on board has been attacked in the Hormuz Strait, reported Sputnik. It added that “MT Jalveer has come under attack off the Oman coast.”

The incident comes just one day after another attack on a commercial tanker off Oman left three Indian seafarers dead, said Sputnik.

The Indian Ocean has long been described as India’s backyard. But this week, the waters near the Strait of Hormuz turned into a graveyard for Indian sailors — and New Delhi has been forced to do something it rarely does with Washington: push back.

Three Indian seafarers are now confirmed dead. Their names — deck cadet Aditya Sharma and engine fitter Shivanand Chaurasiya among them — have emerged from the wreckage of the Palau-flagged tanker MT Settebello, which was struck by US precision munitions in the Gulf of Oman on the night of June 9. A third crew member remains unaccounted for.

It was the second Indian-crewed vessel hit in as many days. Just 24 hours earlier, the MT Marivex — another Palau-flagged tanker carrying 24 Indian sailors — had been disabled by US forces in the same waters. All crew aboard Marivex were rescued. Settebello was not so forgiving.

A Blockade with Civilian Casualties

The US calls it a “precision” operation. The families of Aditya Sharma and Shivanand Chaurasiya would call it something else.

Since mid-April, Washington has imposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports in response to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade once freely flowed. US Central Command says it has disabled eight non-compliant vessels, redirected 134 ships, and allowed 42 humanitarian vessels to pass. The language is clinical, bureaucratic, almost proud.

What that language does not account for are the Indian sailors — men from Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat — who crew the so-called “shadow fleet” tankers that carry sanctioned Iranian oil. These are not combatants. They are migrant workers at sea, employed by shipping companies operating in legal grey zones, often unaware of the geopolitical powder keg beneath their feet. When a US Super Hornet fires precision munitions into a ship’s engine room, there is nothing precise about what happens to the men working inside it.

As The National (Abu Dhabi) reported, the Settebello was the eighth vessel disabled by US forces since the blockade began — and the second in consecutive days. The pattern is no longer an anomaly. It is a policy.

India’s Diplomatic Tightrope Snaps

For months, New Delhi walked a careful line on the US-Iran conflict. India condemned attacks on shipping in general terms. It expressed “deep concern.” It called for “de-escalation.” It thanked Oman for rescue operations. It did not name names.

That changed on Wednesday.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs summoned Jason Meeks, the US Embassy’s deputy chief of mission in New Delhi, to receive what officials described as a “strong protest.” It was Nagaraj Naidu, Additional Secretary (Americas), who delivered the demarche — a quiet but pointed choice of rank, given that US Ambassador Sergio Gor was travelling and unavailable.

Gulf News (Dubai) reported that India’s foreign ministry condemned the attack in unequivocal terms: “We condemn the attack on the commercial vessel Settebello off the coast of Oman.” The statement added that the Settebello was not under US Treasury sanctions — a critical diplomatic signal that India was drawing a distinction between sanctioned Iranian vessels and commercial tankers that happened to be carrying Iranian cargo.

Sources told The Wire that India also stressed the Settebello was not on OFAC’s (Office of Foreign Assets Control) blacklist, and called for the immediate protection of civilian seafarers regardless of a vessel’s cargo manifest.

Al Jazeera confirmed that India’s Foreign Ministry called directly on all parties to end “targeting of commercial shipping and civilian infrastructure in the region” — language that, unusually, encompasses the United States by implication.

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The Oman Factor

In each of these incidents, it has been the Royal Navy of Oman that has answered the distress calls — not the US Navy, which fired the missiles, and not the Indian Navy, which patrols far from these waters.

The Omani response has been swift and professional. After the Marivex incident, India’s MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal offered public gratitude: “We are grateful to the Omani government for its excellent support in rescuing the crew and ensuring their safety.” After Settebello, Oman’s search-and-rescue teams were again on the scene within hours, recovering 21 of the 24 Indian crew while three remained missing — and now confirmed dead.

Oman’s role here is quietly significant. Muscat has maintained diplomatic ties with Tehran throughout the US-Iran war — an unusual position in the Gulf — and has repeatedly served as an informal back-channel between warring parties. That Oman is the nation picking Indian bodies from the sea while the US provides the munitions is an irony not lost on regional observers.

Pattern, Not Incident

It would be tempting to treat these attacks as isolated maritime incidents. They are not.

The broader context, as The National documented, is a cascading spiral: Israel attacked Beirut on Sunday in defiance of Iranian warnings; Iran then launched its first direct strikes on Israel since April; US-Iranian exchanges followed after an American helicopter was downed. The Settebello attack sits inside this spiral — a commercial vessel caught in the crossfire of a war between powers that none of its Indian crew members had any stake in.

India supplies more seafarers to the global merchant fleet than almost any other nation. Indian sailors work on vessels of every flag, in every trade route. That strategic reality — the sheer human footprint of Indian labour across global shipping — means India cannot be a passive bystander when that fleet becomes a battlefield.

The IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez condemned the attack in language that bore the mark of unusual frustration: “This is simply unacceptable. My thoughts are with the families of the three missing seafarers.” The IMO’s formal condemnation, reported by Gulf News, was directed at “any act from any party that endangers the lives of seafarers” — again, a formulation that points without naming.

What Comes Next

India’s summoning of the US diplomat is a signal, not a rupture. New Delhi will not break with Washington over three sailors, however tragic their deaths. The India-US strategic partnership, the Quad architecture, defence technology transfers, and trade relationships are all too weighty to be severed by a demarche.

But the optics are damaging for Washington. The United States has spent years courting India as a strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific. The image of Indian sailors dying in a US military strike — however legally justified Washington may consider it — is not one that plays well in Mumbai or Chennai, or in the Indian parliamentary corridors where anti-Americanism remains a latent political force.

There is also a harder question that India has not yet fully posed publicly: at what point does the protection of Indian nationals overseas become a core national security obligation that overrides diplomatic courtesy? Three Indian seafarers are dead because a US aircraft fired into an engine room. The crew was Indian. The ship was not sanctioned. The cargo was Iranian.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis, as The National and Al Jazeera have both noted, began as a US-Iran confrontation. It is increasingly becoming India’s war too — fought not with weapons, but with the bodies of its seafarers.