The United Arab Emirates said yesterday that special forces from a hostile nation likely carried out co-ordinated attacks last month on four ships near the Strait of Hormuz, but stopped short of directly accusing Iran.
In a closed-door briefing to members of the UN Security Council, Emirati officials presented their preliminary conclusions that small boats dropped divers in the waters near a busy UAE port and that the divers then placed limpet mines on the hulls of the four ships.
Four explosions on May 12 blew holes in the hulls of two tankers from Saudi Arabia, one from Norway and an Emirati ship near the port of Fujairah that serves as a transit point for vessels moving through the Strait of Hormuz.
The tanker blasts have been one of the biggest points of recent tensions in the Persian Gulf. Last month, the Pentagon directly accused Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, of carrying out the attack.
But as a group, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Norway stopped short of blaming Iran in the preliminary findings presented to the UN.
In a briefing after the meeting, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the UN, said Riyadh had no qualms about blaming Tehran for the attacks. “We believe that the responsibility for this action lies on the shoulders of Iran,” he said. “We believe there is enough evidence to demonstrate that.”
Read the article by Dion Nissenbaum in The Australian (from The Wall Street Journal).