Mojtaba Ghahramani, Chief Justice of Hormozgan Province in southern Iran has provided new details about a fuel theft pipeline in Bandar Abbas, revealing that the illegal pipeline branched off the main fuel transfer line and extended for two kilometers.
He stated that the illegal pipeline extracted approximately “70,000 liters” of jet fuel daily from the main line.
On January 11, Ghahramani told Iranian state television that inspections of the discovered equipment and evaluations of pipe corrosion and rust indicate that the thieves had been using this pipeline for a long time.
The Chief Justice of Hormozgan Province also said on January 11, “The value of the illegal pipeline itself is approximately 40 billion rials, and it appears that the thieves possessed the technical expertise and necessary information.”
He added that tests conducted by the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company revealed a shortfall of “over 129,000 liters” in this pipeline over three days.
However, he did not explain how such a significant volume of daily fuel theft over an extended period went unnoticed by refinery officials and those overseeing the transfer routes.
Iranian regime officials do not address the reasons behind the growing fuel smuggling networks, instead portraying the arrests as a demonstration of the “capabilities” of police and security forces.
The low cost of fuel in Iran has always been cited as one of the main reasons for its smuggling.
Malek Shariati, a member of the Iranian parliament’s Energy Commission, revealed in a November 2024 television program that oil was being stolen directly from beneath a refinery pipeline in Iran.
Without naming the refinery or specifying the duration of the theft, Shariati stated that the refinery officials were “unaware for several years” that a branch had been tapped into the pipeline, allowing oil to be stolen.
This is not the first time reports of oil and petroleum product theft have emerged in Iran. Last year, the CEO of the Iranian Oil Pipeline and Telecommunications Company reported a “tenfold increase” in theft due to rising energy prices.
In March 2024, state television broadcast footage of a professional team that had dug a tunnel over two years to infiltrate the Tehran Oil Refinery.
