US forces fired munitions into the engine room of the Palau-flagged tanker MT Settebello after it "repeatedly failed to comply", killing three Indian sailors: Aditya Sharma, Shivanand Chaurasiya and Patnala Suresh1. Of the 24 crew, 21 were rescued. Settebello was one of at least three tankers US forces disabled in The Gulf of Oman that week2, extending a blockade whose running tally had reached 127 vessels redirected and six disabled.
India summoned the US DCM (Deputy Chief of Mission) and lodged a strong protest; Shipping Minister Sarbananda Sonowal called the deaths "deeply unfortunate"3. Delhi has stayed out of the war itself, but India is among the largest users of Iran-routed crude, so its crews and hulls sit inside the strait Washington is throttling. That is the mechanism behind the grievance: the enforcement campaign Trump is now trying to trade away is the same one killing third-country sailors.
the strait closes from both sides at once. The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) declared all Hormuz shipping barred on 11 June; CENTCOM (US Central Command) rejected the order as ineffective and kept firing. A Palau-flagged hull with an Indian crew ended up dead in the gap between two enforcement regimes. The IRGC separately claimed two more ships hit in the strait, a figure that remains unverified by any independent source4.
