Sri Lanka has flown home 238 Iranian sailors who had been stranded on the island following the torpedoing of their warships by a US submarine in early March. The group comprised 32 survivors from the IRIS Dena — a frigate sunk on March 4 off Sri Lanka's southern coast, killing 104 crew — and 206 from the IRIS Bushehr, a second Iranian vessel that was granted safe harbour on humanitarian grounds under the 1907 Hague Convention. Fifteen sailors from the Bushehr remain in Sri Lanka to operate the ship, which is anchored off Trincomalee (a major port city on Sri Lanka's northeastern coast); the circumstances under which the Bushehr crew were permitted to depart remain unclear.