1OCT

Baqaei calls the UAE missile claim baseless

2 min read

19:22UTC

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman called the Emirati missile allegation baseless on 19 August, telling Mehr News Agency that unfounded claims damage confidence between neighbours.

← Back to Washington left Iraq as it answered Tehran Jump to analysis ↓

ConflictDeveloping

Key takeaway

Iran denies the missile allegation but has announced no answer to the Emirati measure itself.

Esmaeil Baqaei, spokesman for Iran's foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati missile allegation as baseless on 19 August. Unfounded claims against Iran damage efforts to prevent regional insecurity and build confidence between neighbours, he told Mehr News Agency⁠¹.

The allegation he is answering dates to 8 August, when the United Arab Emirates said an Iranian missile had targeted an ADNOC vessel in the strait. That claim, and the piracy accusation that followed it, form the stated grounds for the trade and financial halt Abu Dhabi announced on 18 August.

Baqaei disputed the grounds and left the measure alone. He announced no countermeasure, summoned nobody in Abu Dhabi, and named no Emirati official. His phrasing sat in the register of neighbourly confidence-building, which is not the register a government reaches for when it intends to answer in kind.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baqaei, said on 19 August that accusations linking Iran to a missile attack on a UAE-linked vessel are false. He argued that making such claims makes the region less safe, because they damage trust between neighbouring countries. This is Iran's direct answer to the UAE's decision, a day earlier, to name Iran's Revolutionary Guard as the attacker and cut off trade. The two governments now disagree publicly about who did what, with no independent verification available to settle it.

What could happen next?

Meaning
Baqaei's denial keeps Iran's public position that it bears no responsibility for the tanker attacks the UAE has cited as grounds for a full trade halt.

Source Landscape

This story draws on mixed-leaning sources from Iran

Iran

LeftRight

Primary parallel: Baqaei has denied Iranian responsibility for Hormuz-area disputes before; his 13 August comments on strait administration similarly rejected the premise that Iran bears the cost of the conflict's disruption, arguing instead that others owe Iran for environmental damage (ID:5683).

Counter-parallel: Iran's own account of the 11 August Vela Nova strike differs from this case: there, the US openly claimed the strike, leaving Iran nothing to deny. Denial is only available to Tehran when the underlying attack is attributed to it in the first place, which is why this rejection follows the UAE's naming of the IRGC rather than a US claim.

Consensus view: Iran's foreign ministry, through spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei, characterises the UAE's missile allegation as unfounded and argues that repeating it undermines confidence-building between neighbours, the same framing Baqaei used on 13 August when he tied any Hormuz administration deal to compensation for environmental damage he blames on the conflict rather than on Iran.

Counter-view: The UAE's own 13 August statement did not rest on this single incident; it formally named the IRGC as the perpetrator of an ADNOC tanker attack and invoked UN Security Council Resolution 2817, a legal step Abu Dhabi does not appear to have reversed since.

Key tension: Whether a categorical denial from Tehran's spokesman carries weight against a formal, resolution-citing attribution from a state that has just cut all trade with Iran on the strength of it.

Sources:Mehr News Agency·Mehr News Agency

Mentions:Esmaeil Baqaei →Iran →Mehr News Agency →Tehran →Emirates →Abu Dhabi →ADNOC →M/V Vela Nova →United Arab Emirates (UAE) →Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) →UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs →

First Reported In

Update #172 · The strait nobody can count, insure or pay

Mehr News Agency· 19 Aug 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Abu Dhabi cuts Iran's payment channel

Baqaei's rejection answers the missile allegation underlying the UAE's trade halt.

Occurred 17 Aug 2026

Read story →

This Event

Baqaei calls the UAE missile claim baseless

Tehran contests the reason Abu Dhabi gave, not the measure Abu Dhabi took.

Different Perspectives

Russia

Russia vetoed the same renewal on 17 September, arguing that Britain, France and Germany never validly triggered the snapback that reimposed the pre-2015 UN resolutions. No panel was ever seated under that mandate, so the UN list decays fastest for states that screen against it rather than against the American one.

China

China vetoed renewal of the UN sanctions monitoring mandate on 17 September, arguing that Resolution 2231 terminated on 18 October 2025 and that the Security Council should drop Iran's nuclear file altogether. On that reading there is nothing to monitor, so the sanctions survive and their enforcement does not.

Iraq

Baghdad saw the last American counter-Islamic State troops leave its territory on 30 September, completing a timetable it agreed with Washington in September 2024. Iraqi airspace deconfliction passes to Baghdad, which still has an open inquiry into the Maysan drone launches that has named nobody.

Pakistan

Treasury names Waseem Pasha Tajammal of Rawalpindi as the Cavalier group's chairman and places one of the designated incorporations in Islamabad. QatarEnergy separately told Pakistan that liquefied natural gas cargo cancellations would run through November, so Islamabad carries an enforcement question and a supply gap at once.

Turkey

Treasury named a Cavalier Dynamics company incorporated in Istanbul among the ten nodes it designated on 29 September, and Ankara has published no response. Turkey imported a record 120,000 barrels a day of Indian diesel in August, cutting Russia's share of its diesel imports to 20 per cent.

India

Suraj Yadav, a wiper from Uttar Pradesh, was killed aboard the Cape Dao on 23 September, and 19 of the ship's 20 Indian crew were taken off alive. India's September imports ran at 575,000 barrels a day from Iraq and 566,000 from Saudi Arabia, back to pre-conflict rates.