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Yemenis blow Frenchie tanker?
Robert Prather beat me to this one...A French-owned oil tanker is on fire off the coast of Yemen after an explosion on board. Yemeni officials say they do not consider the blast an act of sabotage, but a diplomat at the French embassy said early reports, though contradictory, suggested a terrorist attack. "It seems the oil tanker was rammed by a small boat stuffed with explosives," the French Vice-Consul, Marcel Goncalves, said. Sounds pretty much like a terrorist attack to me... The tanker burst into flame as it headed from Iran towards the port of Ash Shihr, at Mukallah, 570 kilometres (353 miles) east of Aden. Several crew members are reported to have jumped into the sea. Twelve have been taken to hospital, but 13 remain unaccounted for. When you leave witnesses, it's pretty hard to deny things, isn't it? "It seems to be an attack in the same style as the USS Cole," said the diplomat, referring to the attack on the American warship in which 17 US servicemen were killed. There does seem to be a close family resemblence, doesn't there? Yemen's get it tough. They probably have as high a proportion of al-Qaeda sympathizers as Pashtunistan, for much the same reasons â ignorance, disease and poverty, and nobody to blame it on but Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-10-06 |
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