DUBAI (Dispatches) -- The United Arab Emirates on Sunday confirmed after initially denying that at least four commercial vessels had been targeted by "sabotage operations" near its territorial waters.
The incident occurred near the UAE emirate of Fujairah, one of the world's largest bunkering hubs that lies just outside the Strait of Hormuz, it said. The strait is a vital oil and natural gas corridor for the global energy market.
"Subjecting commercial vessels to sabotage operations and threatening the lives of their crew is considered a dangerous development," the UAE foreign ministry said in a statement tweeted by state news agency WAM.
The ministry gave no details about the nature of the sabotage and said it had launched an investigation in coordination with international authorities.
The government of Fujairah earlier in a tweet denied media reports about blasts inside the port of Fujairah and said the facility was operating normally.
The statement did not identify the media outlets that published those reports but the Iranian Press TV website cited a Lebanese broadcaster, Al Mayadeen, saying seven oil tankers were attacked in the port.
Earlier this week, a number of powerful explosions rocked Saudi Arabia’s port city of Yanbu’, an important petroleum shipping terminal for the kingdom. Reports, however, fell short of giving any reason for the blasts or possible casualties.
No further details have been made available up to this moment and no group or individual has assumed responsibility for the blasts.
Yanbu' is an important petroleum shipping terminal for Saudi Arabia and home to three oil refineries, a plastics facility and several other petrochemical plants.
The UAE denied a drone attack by Yemen’s Houthis on an airport in Abu Dhabi in 2018 soon after the fighters attacked Saudi Arabia’s Aramco refinery.
"Of course the Houthis claimed the attack, and there were celebrations in the streets. The government of the Emirates denied there had been a successful drone attack. We were told by current and former officials that the U.S. sort of went along with the story,” the Wall Street Journal reporter Dion Nissenbaum wrote earlier this month.
"The reason for the cover story was that there was this concern that had it gone publicly known that there was a successful attack, even though the damage was somewhat marginal, it could have had widespread economic ramifications for UAE and other countries in the Persian Gulf region," he added.
According to Strobel, several sources later told the Wall Street Journal that "despite the denial at the time, this attack did indeed happen.”