TEHRAN -- Iran on Friday dismissed a claim by the British navy about the seizure of a boat smuggling Iranian weapons, including anti-tank missiles, off the coast of the Gulf of Oman in a joint operation with U.S. forces.
“The countries that have caused the death of people and the destruction of Yemen by sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to the war coalition cannot exonerate themselves by accusing others,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said.
He said the main warmongering countries and the biggest exporters of weapons and equipment to critical zones

in the world are “making false claims and spreading fake news” to mislead the global public opinion.
The spokesman urged the countries to end their “opportunistic” approaches in the Saudi-led war on Yemen instead of shirking their responsibility in the “imposed war against the defenseless and oppressed people of Yemen.”
Britain’s Royal Navy claimed on Thursday that an Iranian boat, traveling south from Iran at high speed during the hours of darkness, was intercepted by forces from British frigate HMS Lancaster before it could navigate back to Iranian territorial waters on February 23.
According to the Bahrain-based United States Fifth Fleet, the seizure took place along a route historically used to smuggle weapons to Yemen.
Iran has on several occasions dismissed Western claims of smuggling arms to Yemen, reaffirming its support for a political solution not a military one to the conflict in the Arab country.
In a statement on Thursday, Kanaani rejected the claims that in January French naval forces had seized thousands of Iranian-supplied weapons and ammunition headed to Yemen as politically-motivated.
A report by the Oxfam charity revealed in January that weapons supplied by the United Kingdom and the United States to the Saudi-led coalition in war-torn Yemen killed at least 839 civilians and wounded 1,775 others in just over a year.
The report revealed that the Saudi-led coalition used weapons supplied solely by the UK and the U.S. in hundreds of attacks targeting civilians in the Arab country between January 2021 and the end of February 2022.