Twenty-seven crew members aboard Iranian crude oil tankers anchored off Sri Lanka’s southern coast were brought ashore on Saturday afternoon after falling ill, and were taken to a private hospital in Colombo, the Daily Mirror reported on Sunday morning.
The account is attributed to the office of the Southern Province Senior Deputy Inspector General of Police.
The evacuation was carried out following the intervention of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Sri Lanka Navy deploying two craft to carry the sick crew from the vessels to Galle Port. From there they were moved to Colombo for further treatment.
Why this matters beyond the medical facts
These are not vessels in transit. They are the empty Iranian tankers that have been anchored off Galle since August, and whose crews Sri Lankan suppliers have been unable to provision.
The ships unloaded crude roughly two months ago and have since sat just outside Sri Lanka’s 12-nautical-mile territorial sea but inside its Exclusive Economic Zone. The United States has issued a global warning against supplying them with food, water, medicine or other services, and Sri Lankan service providers stopped resupplying them rather than risk secondary sanctions. A later refusal was reported in October.
Eleven days ago, Iran asked India to intervene at the highest level to get food, water and medicine to those crews, on the grounds that Indian and Bangladeshi nationals are among them. Iranian Ambassador Dr. Alireza Delkhosh has argued that Sri Lanka cannot refuse the vessels’ needs, citing Article 98 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea together with the SOLAS and SAR conventions.
Two things have now changed. The crews’ condition has become a medical emergency rather than a diplomatic argument, and the Foreign Ministry has acted. Through most of this standoff the Sri Lankan government was described as tight-lipped; Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath told the Cabinet media conference on 8 September that the vessels were in international waters and “not in our waters”. Saturday’s operation is the first reported instance of the ministry intervening to move people off these ships.
What has not been established
No filing gives a cause. The Daily Mirror does not say what the crew members are suffering from, whether the cases are linked, or whether the illness has any connection to the supply position aboard the vessels. The sequence is suggestive and the context above is a matter of record, but a causal link is not reported and should not be assumed — the filing identifies no illness, names no doctor and cites no medical authority.
Also unstated: the crew members’ nationalities, their condition on arrival, which hospital received them, how many vessels the 27 came from, and whether more crew remain unwell at sea. No account says whether this evacuation was treated as a humanitarian exception to the US warning, or how the Navy’s involvement was authorised.
No other verified newsroom had filed its own account of the evacuation at the time of writing. A search of the verified Sri Lankan and international outlets returned only coverage of the separate March 2026 sinking of the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena off Galle, which is a different event.
