Deadly US submarine strike sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka's coast

At least 87 people are dead and dozens more still missing after a US submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka, officials said Wednesday.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Wednesday that a US submarine had sunk an Iranian vessel. 

"An American submarine sunk an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo," Hegseth told reporters.

The Sri Lankan navy recovered the bodies of 87 sailors from waters near the southern city of Galle, but 61 remained missing, police and defence officials said.

"A search is still on for the others," a navy official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Earlier, Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath said Sri Lankan forces had rescued 32 sailors, many wounded, from the stricken Iranian frigate IRIS Dena.

The rescued sailors are being treated in Galle, where an AFP photographer saw the first batch of over two dozen bodies being transported into a hospital on Wednesday evening.

Hegseth called the attack "quiet death" and the first US sinking of an enemy ship by torpedo since World War II.

"Like in that war," he said, "we are fighting to win."

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The Pentagon says one of the main aims of the US-Israeli war against Iran, launched Saturday, is to wipe out the country's navy.

Sri Lanka's foreign minister, Vijitha Herath, told parliament that the rescued Iranians were rushed to the main hospital in the island's south while two navy craft and a plane were deployed to search for others.

The frigate issued a distress call at dawn on Wednesday and within less than an hour a rescue vessel reached the area about 40 kilometres south of the southern port of Galle, the minister said.

The frigate had completely sunk and only an oil patch remained when the navy rescue boats approached.

"We are keeping up a search, but we don't know yet what happened to the rest of the crew," a Sri Lankan defense official told AFP.

Sri Lankan navy spokesman Buddhika Sampath said their operation was in line with Sri Lanka's maritime obligations.

"We responded to the distress call under our international obligations, as this is within our search and rescue area in the Indian Ocean," Sampath told AFP.

"We have found a few bodies from the area where the ship had gone down," Sampath.

Sri Lanka has remained neutral and repeatedly urged dialogue to resolve the conflict in the Mideast.

A little more than a million Sri Lankans are employed in the Middle East and they are a key source of foreign exchange for the country emerging from its worst economic meltdown in 2022.

Both Sri Lanka's navy and the air force said they were not releasing footage of the rescue because it involved the military of another state.

Police stepped up security outside the Galle hospital as the wounded Iranians were brought there by the local navy.

The Iranian Ambassador in Colombo, Alireza Delkhosh, was not immediately available for comment.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)