BRITAIN’S foreign secretary sought to defuse tensions with Iran on Saturday, offering to release an impounded Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar that had become the center of an international crisis.

Jeremy Hunt told counterpart Mohammed Javad Zarif in a “constructive call” that the U.K. would facilitate the Grace 1’s release “if we received guarantees that it would not be going to Syria, following due process in Gibraltar courts.”

“I was told by Zarif that Iran wants to resolve issue and is not seeking to escalate,” Hunt tweeted.

Royal Marines seized the supertanker July 4 on suspicion of violating EU sanctions against Syria, where the U.K. believed it was heading with two million barrels of crude oil.

Days later, Iranian Revolutionary Guards responded by harassing a Royal Navy ship shadowing a British tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, forcing it to train its guns on the vessels.

Tehran, which maintained the oil was not meant for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, had warned the U.K. that if it did not release the vessel there would be serious consequences.

“This is a dangerous game,” a foreign ministry official warned Friday.

The British Foreign Office has been keen to stress it is keeping separate the issues of Iranian threats in Gulf waters, EU sanctions policy on Syria, and the nuclear deal.

But this holds little water with Iran, which sees the U.K.’s move in Gibraltar as a sign it is not acting in good faith as they attempt to resuscitate the 2015 accord.

“It is quite a nuanced difference,” said Charles Hollis, a former British diplomat in Tehran. “The big story is the confrontation over the nuclear deal and although this is, legally and diplomatically, a separate issue, in the minds of Iranians it is quite a fine distinction.”

(SD-Agencies)