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| The Grand Turk |
| Fire rages, flow stops on bombed Turkey pipeline |
| 2010-08-12 |
| [Al Arabiya Latest] Turkish fire-fighters on Wednesday battled to contain a raging fire on a pipeline carrying about a quarter of Iraq's crude oil exports, a day after an explosion blamed on Kurdish militants, officials said. The bomb attack stopped the flow of oil on Tuesday on the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline and killed two people and wounded a third after their vehicles caught fire on a road that runs alongside the link. "The fire continues, and the flow of oil has been halted. Efforts are centered on putting out the flames," said a spokeswoman for Botas, Turkey's state-run pipeline operator. An official speaking on condition of anonymity blamed the blast on sabotage by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has claimed responsibility for similar attacks in the past. "It was a terrorist attack," the official said. The pipeline runs near a motorway in Sirnak province, which borders northern Iraq and Syria. The explosive was remote-controlled, NTV news channel reported, but that could not be immediately confirmed. The section of the pipeline that was struck is near the village of Magara in Sirnak province, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Iraqi border. The oil link is operated by state-run Botas on the Turkish side. The PKK, which has waged a 26-year insurgency against the Turkish state, said it was behind a July explosion on the same pipeline in an area near the site of Tuesday's blast. That explosion knocked out flows for several days. The Kirkuk-Ceyhan link, which consists of two parallel pipelines, carries an average 500,000 barrels of oil a day to the Mediterranean coast, where it is loaded onto tankers. When the larger, main line is damaged, Iraqi officials can use different pumping stations located along the route within Iraq to switch the flow of crude to the other line, oil industry sources have said. |
| Posted by:Fred |