UKMTO

United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations is a Royal Navy coordination centre headquartered at the Maritime Trade Information Centre on Portsdown Hill, Portsmouth, with a liaison office in Dubai. Founded in 2001 as a post-9/11 confidence-building measure, it serves as the primary point of contact between merchant shipping and naval forces across the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Red Sea. UKMTO receives distress reports, issues navigational warnings, and coordinates military responses to maritime threats. It works alongside the US-led Combined Maritime Forces but operates independently under British command.

UKMTO confirmed the first maritime strike of the Iran conflict when an Israeli-owned vessel was hit off the Fujairah coast . As the war expanded, it tracked GPS denial zones spreading from the Strait of Hormuz to Bab al-Mandeb, covering both chokepoints simultaneously .

The centre has become the de facto Early Warning system for the 2026 conflict at sea. Its incident reports are cited by insurers, governments, and media as the authoritative record of attacks, making UKMTO's communications the closest thing to a real-time maritime battlefield log. By 18 April 2026, the centre had confirmed IRGC gunboats firing on an Indian-flagged super tanker in the strait, a new category of incident with a state naval force directly attacking a third-country vessel. On 7 July 2026, UKMTO reported a second, unnamed tanker struck in the same overnight window as an IRGC missile strike on the Qatari LNG carrier Al Rekayyat near Limah, Oman, extending its record as the first body to confirm multi-vessel attacks within hours of occurrence.