Houthis renege on new deal to prevent Red Sea oil spill disaster

Houthis renege on new deal to prevent Red Sea oil spill disaster

AL-MUKALLA: The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen on Sunday reneged on a deal to head off an environmental disaster in the Red Sea, only hours after reaching an agreement with the UN. The Houthis first said they supported a new plan by UN officials to pump one million barrels of oil out of the decaying oil storage vessel Safer, which is moored off the port of Hodeidah. But as the UN’s Yemen coordinator David Gressly hailed “constructive” talks on the plan, which is also supported by Yemen’s government, the Houthis backtracked. They said the UN was guilty of “continued disregard of its obligations” over the tanker and accused the UN mission of wasting funds allocated for maintaining the vessel. The rusting storage tanker is more than 40 years old and has not been maintained since early 2015, when international experts fled as the Houthis took control of swaths of Yemen in a coup. Environmentalists have issued a series of warnings about the danger. The Safer has neither power nor a functioning fire-fighting system, and volatile gases are thought to be building up inside. “The risk of imminent catastrophe is very real,” Gressly said. “We need … action as soon as