SANA’A (Dispatches) – The United Nations is still working on raising the funds to prevent a massive oil spill from the Safer oil tanker in the Red Sea off Yemen, which still goes 16 million U.S. dollars short, a Yemeni official told Xinhua.
According to the local official who asked to remain anonymous, “the UN is getting close to receiving enough funds to reach the 80-million-dollar target to salvage oil from the rotting Safer tanker that’s falling apart off the war-ravaged Arab country.”
“Yemen’s private sector, particularly the multinational HSA Group, announced that it will donate 1.2 million dollars to fund the UN’s salvage operation,” he added.
The Yemeni official reaffirmed full support for the UN efforts aimed at pumping more than 1 million barrels of oil from the 45-year-old Safer tanker and stopping an environmental catastrophe in the Red Sea.
In June, the UN launched a crowdfunding campaign to avert oil spill from the decaying FSO Safer that is moored in the Red Sea north of the Yemeni port city of Hudaydah.
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.
The Safer has been moored in the Red Sea since 1988.
In another development, the Saudi-led coalition forces are holding three Yemen-bound oil tankers carrying thousands of tons of fuel for the crisis-stricken country in flagrant breach of a UN-brokered ceasefire.
The coalition has impounded the tankers, including two laden with tens of thousands of liters of diesel fuel, and is not allowing them to sail towards Yemen, Essam al-Mutawakil, a spokesman for the Yemen Petroleum Company (YPC), told Arabic-language al-Masirah television network on Friday.
Mutawakil added that the ships, destined for Yemen’s western port of Hudaydah, are being held despite being inspected and cleared for the port call by the United Nations staff.
The senior Yemeni official went on to highlight that a total of 54 fuel ships were expected to moor in Hudaydah port as a result of the UN-sponsored truce.
Only 33 vessels have arrived at the port since the ceasefire initially took effect on April 2 and was extended on June 2 for another two months.
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with its Arab allies and with arms and logistics support from the U.S. and other Western states.
The objective was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.