Press Trust of India Posted online: Sunday, October 06, 2002 at 1840 hours IST
Sanaa, October 6: A boat packed with explosives rammed and badly holed a French supertanker off Yemen on Sunday, a week before the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US warship Cole, the French embassy said.
Twelve of the 25 crew had been "recovered" and hospitalised with injuries, but the others remained unaccounted for. Sixteen of the crew were Bulgarian.
"The oil tanker was rammed by a small boat stuffed with explosives," as it came by an off-shore terminal in the Arabian Sea, vice consul Marcel Goncalves said.
"It seems to be an attack in the same style as the US Cole," he said of the destroyer blown up by suspected Al-Qaeda militants in Aden harbour almost exactly two years ago on October, 12, 2000.
A gaping hole was blown into the side of the tanker "Linbourg", owned by the company "French Ship Management", the diplomat said.
"It is sinking, if it has not already sunk," Goncalves added of the French tanker located some 700 km east of Aden.
The vessel, carrying 397,000 barrels of crude from Iran's Kharj terminal, was to add a further 1.5 million barrels of Yemeni oil from Mina al-Thabah, an official with the Hadramaut local government said.
The ship was now located just off Ar-Riyan airport, outside the city of Al-Mukalla, 700 km east of Aden, a correspondent at the scene reported.
A huge pall of smoke blew over the Al-Mukalla area.
