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The head of the UN maritime body said on Wednesday that he was “extremely concerned” about the risk of an oil spill in the Red Sea, after Yemen’s Houthi rebels set fire to a tanker carrying 1mn barrels of crude.
The statement from Arsenio Dominguez, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization, underlined growing international concern about the fate of the Greek-owned Sounion, which was disabled in a missile attack last week.
The Houthis then started a fire by setting off explosives on the decks, after the crew had been rescued.
The Pentagon sounded the alarm on Tuesday by warning that the vessel was leaking some of its cargo of Iraqi crude, heightening fears of a larger and more damaging oil spill.
The EU naval task force on Wednesday described the ship as a “serious and imminent threat”, although it did not believe the cargo had yet leaked.
“I am extremely concerned about the situation regarding the tanker Sounion, which was targeted while transiting the southern Red Sea,” Dominguez said in a statement.
“The risk of an oil spill, posing an extremely serious environmental hazard, remains high and there is widespread concern about the damage such a spill would cause within the region.”
A bulletin from the EU naval task force was accompanied by pictures that showed several fires on the vessel, which is sitting 77 nautical miles west of the Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The vessel is also clearly listing in one of the pictures.
“Sounion poses both a navigational risk and a serious and imminent threat of regional pollution,” the statement said.
A leak from the Sounion, whose 1mn-barrel cargo is equivalent to 150,000 tonnes, would be likely to produce the most serious hydrocarbon spill since the Sanchi tanker disaster in 2018.
The Sanchi leaked 113,000 tonnes of natural-gas condensate into the South China Sea after a collision. It could be the worst since the ABT Summer sank off the coast of Angola in 1991, spilling 260,000 tonnes of crude oil.
Efforts to salvage the Sounion have so far been unsuccessful because of the threat posed by the Houthis. The Pentagon said on Tuesday that two tugs had tried to salvage the ship but the Houthis had warned away their crews and threatened to attack them.
The Houthis claim to be acting in support of Gaza’s Palestinians in the war with Israel following Hamas’s attack on the Jewish state on October 7 last year.
Martin Kelly, senior Middle East analyst at maritime risk consultancy EOS Risk Group, said the Sounion’s fate continued to be “a huge issue”.
“The sheer scale of the potential catastrophe should be worrying for every coastal state that depends on any sort of ecosystem in the Red Sea,” he said.