SANA’A (Dispatches) – A senior Yemeni official says the country’s armed forces will launch retaliatory strikes against oil installations deep inside Saudi Arabia in case the Riyadh-led coalition keeps on smuggling hauls of contraband crude oil and natural gas out of the country.
Mohammad Tahir Anam, an adviser to the Yemeni Supreme Political Council, warned the alliance that Yemeni authorities would not allow Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to further violate the extended United Nations-brokered ceasefire and plunder Yemeni oil and gas.
The Yemeni official reported a sharp increase in the theft of Yemeni oil and gas in addition to the seizure of Yemeni vessels off the coast of the country’s southern province of Shabwah.
“We will be targeting Saudi companies and ships, along with their oil and gas refineries,” Anam said.
Moreover, Mohammed Muftah, another adviser to the Yemeni Supreme Political Council, gave the Saudi-led coalition a stern warning, stating that tanker ships that loot Yemeni crude oil and natural gas will be targeted.
His remarks came a few days after Apolytares tanker, carrying more than two million barrels of stolen Yemen oil worth over $270 million, departed al-Shahar port in Hadhramaut province of Yemen for the Port of Sriracha in Thailand.
Meanwhile, the United Nations on Monday launched a crowdfund campaign to avert oil spill from the decaying FSO Safer that is moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni city of Hudaydah, a UN spokesman said.
The UN resident coordinator and humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, David Gressly, on Monday announced the launch of a social media campaign “to raise the necessary funds to start the emergency operation to transfer the oil from the FSO Safer to a safe temporary vessel,” Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said at the regular press briefing.
A May 11 pledging conference, co-hosted by the Netherlands and the United Nations, raised around 40 million dollars of the funds needed.
According to the United Nations, the overall estimated cost of the UN plan is about 144 million dollars, including the long-term replacement of the floating storage and offloading (FSO) vessel.
The decaying, dilapidated supertanker has been described as a “floating time-bomb” that risks causing an explosion or an oil spill four times as disastrous as the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident in the Red Sea.