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UAE Decides to Confiscate Tankers Smuggling Iraqi Oil
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Saturday announced that it will ban any tankers smuggling Iraqi oil from sailing into its territorial waters and will impose severe penalties to the violators, the official WAM news agency reported.
The remarks were made by UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Sheikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan at a meeting of a ministerial committee set up on Saturday to follow up vessels busting the decade-old international embargo against Iraq and smuggling oil across the Persian Gulf.
Nahyan affirmed his country's keen desire to continue applying tough measures against vessels violating the embargo and smuggling Iraqi oil, the news agency said.
The penalties will include confiscating tankers and their shipments, and punishing owners of the vessels, no matter they belong to local companies or branches of foreign ones.
The meeting also discussed the efforts made by the UAE authorities concerned to fight pollution and contain the environmental damage, caused by the leak of more than 300 tons of oil from the doomed Iraqi tanker "Zainab", which carried 1,300 tons of fuel oil and sank off the coast of Dubai last Saturday.
Also reviewed at the meeting was the latest case of a Honduras- flagged oil tanker "Diamond", which was intercepted in the UAE offshore areas by U.S.-Britain-run naval forces from the U.N. Sanctions Committee and was towed to the UAE port of Zayed last Thursday.
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