An oil tanker owned by Bermudian-based Nordic American Tankers was being refuelled in the Persian Gulf on Friday when a limpet mine was discovered on a ship that was providing the fuel transfer, according to a report by Associated Press

It said the NAT vessel, the MT Nordic Freedom, was evacuated as an Iraqi team worked to neutralise the mine that was attached to the ship-to-ship transfer tanker MTPola.

An Iraqi statement said an explosives-handling team from the country’s interior ministry was airlifted to the scene after a “foreign body” was observed attached to one of the ships in the waiting area in Iraq’s international waters, 28 nautical miles from Iraqi oil ports.

AP reported that Sudharsan Sarathy, a senior oil analyst at the data-analysis firm Refinitiv, said the Pola was conducting a ship-to-ship transfer with Nordic Freedom.