Iran on Thursday aired its own video of an incident in the Strait of Hormuz with US warships, in a bid to counter Pentagon accusations that the Iranians warned they could blow up the American vessels.
The video broadcast by Iran's English-language channel Press-TV showed an Iranian commander in a speedboat contacting an American sailor via radio, asking him to identify the US vessels and state their purpose.
"Coalition warship number 73, this is an Iranian patrol," the Iranian commander is heard to say in English, asking for the vessel to confirm its number. "This is coalition warship number 73. I am operating in international waters," replied the American voice.
State-run Press-TV said the footage had been released by the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological force involved in the incident. The Pentagon released a video and audio tape on Tuesday that it said confirmed US charges that Iranian speedboats swarmed around US warships in the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday and radioed a threat to blow them up.
The alleged confrontation has further inflamed tensions between Iran and the United States which are locked in a stand-off over Tehran's controversial nuclear drive. The tape showed "warship number 73" - the USS Port Royal - looming in the foreground and also showed the two other US vessels in the incident, the USS Hopper and the USS Ingraham. A helicopter was also shown hovering above the US ships in the Iranian footage, shot with a hand held-camera inside the speedboat.
"Request your present course and speed!" added the Iranian commander, who was wearing a yellow lifejacket and the kefiyeh scarf often sported by Iranian revolutionary forces.
The dialogue in the video was repetitive and sometimes technical, with the sides agreeing to switch from channel 16 to channel 11 on their radios. However Iran clearly sees the release of the footage as buttressing its claims that the incident was purely a routine matter of identification that ended without any disturbance.
"Iran clearly just wanted to identify the vessels and find out what they were doing," concluded the Press-TV anchor. The Revolutionary Guards had said the day earlier that the film released by the Pentagon was a "clumsy fake" where the sound and image were not properly synchronised.
The US video, which the Pentagon said was taken from the bridge of the USS Hopper, showed Iranian boats approaching the warships at high speeds and racing around its hull. "I am coming to you... You will explode in a few minutes," a man's voice is heard to say on the video.