The Fars news agency quoted an Admiral Zamini as telling it, “We are planning to send light submarines to Iran’s northern territorial waters.”
Azerbaijan assailed the Iranian media for the story, not admiral Zamini. Gudrat Gurbanov, head of the State Maritime Administration, said, “No country’s submarines can be in the waters of the Caspian Sea.”
He said the stories carried in the Iranian media were all “nonsense.”
The Islamic Republic has been mass-producing its Qadir-class mini-sub for the last few years and has almost two dozen of them.
Iran and the other four coastal states around the Caspian have not been able to agree on a new treaty govering the Caspian since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As a result, two treaties dating from the years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution still govern the Caspian.