United States Marines on Sunday found a small arms cache aboard the cargo ship Touska, an Iranian-flagged vessel that tried to run a US naval blockade, after the USS Spruance, a guided missile destroyer, intercepted the 900-foot behemoth and punched holes in its engine compartment with 5-inch shells and 25mm machine gun fire.
Combat actions followed a six-hour standoff, and after the US Navy advised the Touska to evacuate its engine compartment. CENTCOM later released a video clip of Marines rappelling onto the Tuska’s deck, but not of them clearing the ship.
A CENTCOM source told Real Raw News that Marines, while exhaustively investigating the ship, encountered two “hostiles” caparisoned in body armor in a hallway near the galley. However, they appeared to be unarmed, and when ordered to surrender immediately, they fled instead of fighting, scampering away from the advancing Marines. They didn’t make it far, as the Marines had quickly closed the distance and used non-lethal force to subdue the pair.
One of the two, described to RRN as “Arabs” who spoke broken English, begged for his life, claiming, incredulously, that he was an innocent “stowaway” inadvertently enmeshed in an unfortunate situation. Apparently, he forgot he was wearing Kevlar chest armor and a ballistic helmet. By then, though, the Marines topside had stormed the wheelhouse and obtained the ship’s cargo and crew manifests, which included photographs of all crew. The “stowaway” was Mohammad Salehi, an electro-technical officer who had served on the Touska since March 2024.
Salehi and his partner confessed they ran in hopes of reaching an arms locker, so they could defend the ship against “American imperialists.” They led Marines to an unsecured arms room, which contained weapons racks brimming with Kalashnikov rifles, RPGs, and three archaic Soviet AGS-17 automatic grenade launchers. Salehi told the Marines that the weapons were for self-defense, in case the ship met Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. When the Marines opened wooden crates containing night-vision goggles and GPS guidance chips used in Shahed drones, Salehi fell silent.
“We confiscated it all and moved it to the [US Amphibious Assault Ship] Tripoli to catalog it all. They were playing blockade-runner for a reason, wasn’t some innocent cargo ship,” our source said.