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LONDON — Britain on Saturday warned Iran that “there will be serious consequences” for seizing a British-owned oil tanker and warned ships to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial shipping route for the world’s oil supplies.

The British government said in a statement released on Saturday after an emergency meeting the previous night that it had “advised U.K. shipping to stay out of the area for an interim period.”

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The British defence minister, Penny Mordaunt, said in a television interview on Saturday that the ship had been intercepted in Omani waters, not Iranian, and called the seizure “a hostile act.”

By Saturday afternoon, Britain had summoned the Iranian ambassador to register its protest, and a second emergency Cabinet meeting was set to begin.

The capture of the tanker is a sharp step up after three months of rising tensions between Iran and the West that last month brought the United States within minutes of a military strike against targets in Iran. A fifth of the world’s crude oil supply is shipped from the Persian Gulf through the narrow Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran, and oil prices spiked sharply on Friday even before the British warning.