The United States is looking to develop an "international consensus" over the tanker attacks near the Strait of Hormuz that it has blamed on Iran, acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Friday.

"Fifteen percent of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz. So we obviously need to make contingency plans should the situation deteriorate," he told reporters in Washington. "We also need to broaden our support for this international situation."

Shanahan made the remarks a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Tehran for the attacks, citing a U.S. assessment based on intelligence, type of weapons used and level of expertise needed to carry out the operation.

(Screengrab of surveillance footage released by the U.S. Navy that it asserts is proof that Iran attacked two tankers near the Strait of Hormuz.)
[Photo courtesy of the U.S. Navy]

In London, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt on Friday also blamed Iran for the attacks on two oil tankers, including one operated by a Tokyo-based company, near the strategically important sea lane.

"Our own assessment leads us to conclude that responsibility for the attacks almost certainly lies with Iran," he said in a statement. "These latest attacks build on a pattern of destabilizing Iranian behavior and pose a serious danger to the region."

The statement added: "It is almost certain that a branch of the Iranian military -- the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- attacked the two tankers on 13 June. No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible."

The U.S. military released Thursday a monochrome video that purportedly shows an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps patrol boat pulling up alongside the stricken tanker and a dozen crew members can be seen removing an unexploded limpet mine from it. The United States says the footage is proof that Iran attacked the two oil tankers.

Iran's Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Eshagh Al Habib the same day brushed aside U.S. claims that Tehran is responsible for the attacks.

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