“For one or two seconds, I was knocked out,” he says. “Everything went black. The power was gone. I looked up – fire and thick black smoke was pouring down.”
Shocked by the explosion, he tried to make sense of what was happening, before realising he needed to escape – and quickly.
“The engine room had been destroyed. There were metal pipes, insulation covers, tanks, torn apart. A 2cm-thick solid fire door, glass windows – bang, all gone.
“I thought: ‘I’m alive. I have to get out of here.’”
Basis’s extraordinary testimony to the Guardian lays out in detail for the first time the terrifying experiences of the seafarers on the ships at the centre of the US-Israeli war against Iran.
He is “one of the lucky ones”, he says, surviving an incident from which not everyone escaped alive.
The Marshall Islands-flagged tanker MKD Vyom had been bound for Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, from Amsterdam via the strait of Hormuz. Amid the escalating conflict, the ship had been instructed to stop, report anything suspicious and await further instructions, Basis says.
More than 100 miles from Iran, “very far” from the strait and with no ships nearby, no one was unduly worried, he says.
At the time Basis had no idea that, two hours before the MKD Vyom was hit, another tanker, the Skylight, had come under attack, killing one seafarer and leaving another missing.
The full article is here.
