Posted on 10/14/2002 6:52:40 PM PDT by Nachum
US investigators now believe that a blast that crippled a French supertanker off the coast of Yemen this week was terrorism, reversing an initial assessment that the explosion could have been an accident, two senior US officials said Thursday.
The officials, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said they were revising their position based on preliminary reports from US, French and Yemeni investigators who are now on the stricken vessel looking into the blast.
"There are now lots of indications that it was caused by some bad people, terrorists," one official said, stressing, however that the probe had not yet been finalized.
A second official echoed those comments, saying: "There are signs that it was caused by something other than an internal explosion, but there are no definitive results."
On Monday, officials at the State Department said the first evidence from the ship, the Limburg, suggested the explosion was accidental and lent credence to a theory advanced by Yemeni authorities who said it was an accident.
Meanwhile, photographs of the hole in the side of the French supertanker Limburg left by a mysterious blast off the coast of Yemen support claims that the explosion was the work of terrorists, the Lloyd's List specialist shipping publication said Thursday.
Sunday's blast badly holed the Limburg as it prepared to enter Ash-Shir port, 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Al-Mukalla, off the southeastern coast of Yemen, to load a cargo of crude oil.
Lloyd's List said the photographs "clearly show that the metal at the edges of the eight m (met re) wide hole is bent inwards in a manner more consistent with reports from the ship's master that it was subject to a bomb attack than with the theory put forward by the Yemeni government and the US State Department that the explosion came from within the ship.
"The location of the hole at the waterline and the absence of any noticeable blast damage to the deck of the ship would also support the bomb theory," it added in a front page article.
Earlier Thursday, however, Yemen's Transport and Maritime Affairs Minister Said Yafhi said that Sanaa was not ruling out any possibility as to the cause of the blast.
"We are leaving all options open," he told reporters. "We are not ruling out any option in this incident. We are not ruling out anything at the moment."
He spoke after seven French, two US and an undisclosed number of Yemeni investigators boarded the Limburg to begin their investigation into blast that badly damaged the ship as it prepared to enter Ash-Shir port, 30 kilometers (20 miles) from Al-Mukalla, to load a cargo of crude oil.
Until Yafhi's statement, Sanaa had played down the possibility that the blast was the result of an attack such as the October 12, 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in the southern port of Aden that killed 17 sailors and was blamed on the al-Qaeda terror network.
That theory was initially advanced by the French embassy in Sanaa, which said the explosion was caused by a small boat packed with explosives that rammed the oil tanker.
The French foreign ministry later said there was no proof so far of an attack, although the ship's master has ruled out an accident.
AFP
The French foreign ministry is still maintaining there is no "proof" that they ever aided and abetted the Nazis during WWII.
What is wrong with these people?
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