Yemen rebels back UN proposal for abandoned oil tanker

Yemen rebels back UN proposal for abandoned oil tanker

Yemen's Huthi rebels have signed a UN agreement hoped to help stop a rusting oil tanker in the Red Sea becoming an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe, officials said Monday.

The 45-year-old FSO Safer, long used as a floating oil storage platform with 1.1 million barrels of crude on board, has been moored off Yemen's western Red Sea port of Hodeida since 2015, without being serviced.

Huthi leaders and David Gressly, the UN humanitarian coordinator for war-torn Yemen, signed a "memorandum of understanding" on a "framework for cooperation on the UN-coordinated proposal to resolve the threat posed by the FSO Safer," UN spokesman Russell Geekie said.