The United States Embassy in Colombo has formally raised the presence of Iranian vessels off Sri Lanka with the Foreign Ministry, asking whether the authorities were aware of the ships and monitoring their movements, Foreign Affairs Minister Vijitha Herath said.
Herath disclosed the approach at the Cabinet decisions media briefing on Tuesday, the Daily Mirror reported. He said the Defence and Ports Ministries were notified after the embassy’s inquiry, and that the Sri Lanka Navy is monitoring the vessels.
“They are not in our waters,” he said.
The count has more than doubled
Herath put the total at 47 vessels in international waters more than 24 nautical miles from Sri Lanka’s territorial sea. He said these included several Iranian-flagged ships alongside other commercial and cargo vessels, none of which had entered Sri Lankan territorial waters.
That figure is a sharp increase on the last official account. When the Foreign Ministry first commented publicly on the anchorage on August 29, it cited the tracking service TankerTrackers for a total of close to 20 Iranian tankers near the Exclusive Economic Zone — around 13 Iranian-flagged, the rest sanctions-evading “shadow fleet” ships. The build-up was first visible off the southern coast in late August.
The two counts are not measured on the same basis. The August figure covered Iranian-linked tankers specifically; Tuesday’s 47 covers all vessels identified in the zone, including ordinary commercial and cargo traffic. Herath did not say how many of the 47 are Iranian-flagged, and no outlet has published a breakdown.
A different line on the map
The August statement was framed around the 12-nautical-mile territorial sea and the Exclusive Economic Zone. Herath’s 24-nautical-mile marker is the outer limit of the contiguous zone, the belt beyond the territorial sea where a state retains only limited enforcement powers. Placing the vessels beyond it puts them further out than the earlier descriptions did.
No facilities requested or given
Herath said none of the vessels had asked the Sri Lankan government for facilities or assistance, and none had been provided — consistent with the position the Foreign Ministry took in August. He said it is common for commercial and cargo vessels to sit in international waters off countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia while awaiting further operations.
Apart from monitoring, he said, the government had not intervened or taken any action concerning the ships.
Sri Lanka has been drawn into the US–Iran confrontation before at closer range. A Deputy Minister of Defence confirmed in April that a US submarine had sunk the IRIS Dena roughly 19 nautical miles off the Sri Lankan coast.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not say when the US Embassy made the approach, in what form, or whether Colombo has replied. It does not give the Navy’s assessment, the vessels’ locations or flags beyond Herath’s summary, or how many of the 47 are Iranian. Neither the embassy nor the Iranian mission is quoted, and the report does not say whether the government regards the inquiry as routine or as pressure.
Ada Derana also carried an account of the 47-vessel figure on Tuesday, but its site returned a CloudFront block on every attempt at the time of filing and it could not be verified or dated.
Update, September 9: NewsFirst account cites the 12-mile limit, not 24
NewsFirst has published its own account of the same briefing, corroborating the 47-vessel total, the presence of “a small number” of Iranian vessels among them, the absence of any request for facilities under international maritime law, and Herath’s comparison with commercial anchorages off Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The two outlets differ on which maritime boundary Herath actually named. The Daily Mirror reported the vessels as lying beyond 24 nautical miles — the outer limit of the contiguous zone, as noted above. NewsFirst reports Herath citing Sri Lanka’s 12-nautical-mile territorial sea under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and placing the vessels beyond that.
The distinction matters for how far out the ships are being described as sitting. Both accounts agree the vessels are outside Sri Lankan waters, and 24 nautical miles would satisfy the 12-mile test as well — but only the Daily Mirror puts them at the greater distance. NewsFirst quotes the minister directly on the narrower point: “We have observed that these vessels are outside Sri Lanka’s maritime boundary. None of them are within Sri Lanka’s territorial waters.”
Neither outlet gives a position or a distance for any individual vessel, so the discrepancy cannot be resolved from the published reporting. It remains unclear whether Herath cited both limits and each outlet selected one.
NewsFirst adds that the government has extended no logistical or operational support, and that no requests have been received from any of the vessels under international maritime law provisions — consistent with the Daily Mirror’s account.
