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Parts of the Red Sea are facing a significant pollution risk after Yemen’s Houthis blew up a crippled tanker and its crude oil cargo in the middle of the strategic waterway.
The Iran-backed group on Friday posted videos showing their forces’ deliberate blowing up of the Greek-owned oil tanker Sounion, whose crew had been forced to abandon ship after a series of attacks by the Houthis on Wednesday.
The EU’s Operation Aspides naval force had warned on Thursday that the drifting, abandoned vessel and its cargo of 150,000 tonnes of crude oil represented a “navigational and environmental hazard” and urged against any action that would worsen the risk.
The blowing up of the ship marks a new tactic for the Houthis. Since the group began its campaign against international shipping last November, it has sunk two ships — the Rubymar, attacked in February, and the Tutor, attacked in June. However, it has not previously deliberately blown up an abandoned ship.
Neither the Rubymar nor the Tutor was carrying a liquid cargo and there were no reports of serious pollution.
The UK’s Maritime Trade Operations office reported before the Houthis posted their video that three fires had been observed on the ship. That would be consistent with the video posted on a Houthi X account on Friday evening. It showed huge explosions ripping through a vessel bearing the name “Delta Tankers”, the Sounion’s Greece-based owners. The ship was attacked in the middle of the Red Sea, 77 nautical miles west of the Houthi-controlled port of Hodeidah.
The Houthis’ spokesman posted the footage with words describing it as showing the Yemeni Navy — the name the group gives to its own naval forces — burning the Sounion. The post said its owners had violated the Houthis’ bans on using ports in “occupied Palestine”, as they call Israel.
The Houthis have portrayed their campaign as an effort to support Palestinians in Gaza following Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7. The hundreds of attacks on commercial ships have prompted many international shipping groups to reroute vessels away from the strategic route through the Red Sea and Suez Canal linking the Middle East and Asia with the Mediterranean and Europe.
There was no immediate assessment from Operation Aspides of the extent of the environmental damage from the explosion. However, the vessel was 274-metre long and the reported 150,000-tonne cargo would be around the full capacity of a vessel of its type — about 1mn barrels.
A communications agency representing Delta Tankers reiterated the company’s previous insistence that it was seeking to salvage the ship.
“Delta Tankers is doing everything it can to move the vessel and cargo,” the agency said, after publication of the Houthis’ video.
It had previously insisted the Sounion suffered only “minor damage” in a series of missile strikes on Wednesday.
The attack on the Sounion was the Houthis’ first successful attack on a commercial ship since the attack on June 12 on the Tutor, which killed a mariner as well as sinking the ship.
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