TankerTrackers.com was among the first to notice on July 6, 2019, that Andrea Victory had taken her cargo back on board and was signaling that she would be taking a route to Iran's Bandar Imam Khomeini port at the northern tip of the Persian Gulf. Bloomberg and Refinitiv Energy have since confirmed Andrea Victory's final destination as Bandar Imam Khomeini.

In a curious twist of events, the Norwegian-flagged Andrea Victory , one of four oil tankers the U.S. government says were victims of attacks by Iranian forces or their proxies in the Gulf of Oman in May, is now on its way to complete delivery of its cargo to Iran. In the Mediterranean, there also continue to be confusing and conflicting claims surrounding Grace 1 , an Iranian tanker reportedly bound for Syria that British security forces seized last week off the coast of Gibraltar, which Iranian authorities now say was going "somewhere else."

The tanker had offloaded her cargo of vegetable oil, which she had originally picked up in Argentina, following a still nebulous attack on May 12, 2019 , in the Gulf of Oman near the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. That left the ship with a hole in her empty aft peak tank, which required it to go into dry dock for repairs.

Nearly two months later, no group has publicly taken responsibility for the attack on Andrea Victory or any of the three other tankers that also suffered damage off the coast of Fujairah in that incident. The United States has blamed Iran or proxies for carrying out the attacks, as well as subsequent attacks on two more tankers in a part of the Gulf of Oman closer to Iran in June 2019. Iran has strenuously denied involvement in either of these incidents.

"Suspicious doesn't begin to describe what likely transpired this morning," Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said regarding the second set of attacks in June. The revelation that Andrea Victory's final destination was Iran is likely to fuel this narrative that some other party may have staged these tanker attacks in order to provoke a confrontation with the Iranian regime.

However, so far, there is no hard evidence to support this theory, while there are significant indications that Iran was at least involved in some way in the June attacks. It is equally possible that Iranian forces or their proxies had targeted Andrea Victory in the May incident to help cast doubt on the country's involvement or that they simply struck tankers at random.

In May 2019, Reuters had also reported that the Norwegian Shipowners’ Mutual War Risks Insurance Association, also known by the Norwegian acronym DNK, had concluded that it was "highly likely" that Iran or its proxies were responsible for the attack on the tankers off Fujairah. DNK reportedly made its assessment based, in part, on similarities between what had happened to Andrea Victory and attacks that Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen had launched on commercial and military ships using unmanned, explosive-laden boats. But it remains unclear what the exact weapons employed in the May attacks were and whether they included limpet mines, as appears to have been the case in the second set of tanker attacks a month later.