By
Updated Sept. 30, 2015 2:21 p.m. ET
RIYADH—A Saudi Arabia-led military coalition fighting
Iranian-backed forces in Yemen said Wednesday that it had intercepted an
Iranian boat carrying arms to the embattled country, compounding
tensions between the region’s two main powers.
The ship,
interdicted Saturday, was carrying 14 Iranians as well as missile
launchers, antitank shells and missiles, the coalition said.
The
Iranian government called the coalition’s account a fabrication and its
allegations baseless, and said it was an attempt by Saudi Arabia to wage
psychological warfare, Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency
reported.
An official of Iran’s Yemeni allies, the Houthis,
denied late Wednesday that the arms aboard the boat were intended for
his group. Such weapons are widely available locally, he said. The
Houthis, have acknowledged Iranian political support but have repeatedly
denied receiving arms from Tehran.
The interdiction of the ship
in the Arabian Sea, 150 miles southeast of the port of Salalah in Oman,
comes amid particularly strained relations between Iran and Saudi
Arabia, who have been fighting what amounts to a proxy war in Yemen.
Tehran
has been scathing in its criticism of Riyadh for what it calls its
mishandling of the stampede during the Hajj pilgrimage last week in
which 769 people died, including 239 Iranians.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
said Wednesday that Saudi Arabia wasn’t doing an efficient job of
transferring the bodies of dead pilgrims back to Iran, the official
Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Without elaborating, Mr.
Khamenei said any failure by Saudi Arabia to fulfill its duties would
elicit a harsh response from Iran.
Riyadh has rejected Iran’s criticism and accused Tehran of politicizing a religious commemoration.
In its statement Wednesday, the Saudi-led, anti-Houthi coalition said the intercepted boat was registered under the name of Jan Mohammed Hut, an Iranian citizen, and licensed by Iranian authorities to fish in those waters.
The
coalition has operated an air-and-sea blockade of Yemen since shortly
after launching airstrikes in the country in March in a bid to dislodge
the Houthis from the capital San’a and restore exiled President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi to power.
Mr. Hadi accused Iran on Tuesday of seeking his country’s destruction by backing Houthi rebels in Yemen’s civil war.
In
a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he blamed Iran for
supporting what he called a “military and political coup d’état” by
Houthi rebels and the former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The
battle for Yemen has grown more intractable since it began in March. The
Saudi-led airstrikes initially did little to reverse Houthi territorial
gains, but with the push by its ground troops this summer, the
coalition has slowly gained the initiative.
Coalition-allied
forces retook the southern port city of Aden in July before securing
several southern provinces in August. They are now in a battle for the
energy-rich central province of Marib, which borders the
Houthi-controlled capital San’a.
With more than 2,000 civilians
estimated to have died since the conflict began, human-rights groups
have expressed growing concern about the war’s casualty toll.
An
explosion Monday at a wedding party near the western port of Mocha
killed more than 100 people. Houthi officials blamed the Saudi coalition
for the blast.
There have been few interdictions of Iranian vessels off Yemen’s coast.
The
U.S. Navy and Yemeni coast guard detained a boat called the Jihan as it
sailed from Iran into Yemeni territorial waters in 2013, according to a
United Nations report.
That boat was carrying rockets, plastic explosives and other munitions that a U.N. panel traced back to Iran.
The
panel didn’t establish conclusively whether the arms were bound for the
Houthis, although the ship’s crew was Yemeni and the shipment was
arranged by a Yemeni businessman, the U.N. panel said.
Also in 2013, Yemeni forces captured a boat carrying weapons called the Jihan 2 in the narrow Bab el-Mandab Strait, according to Yemen state media.
The
vessel interdicted Saturday had onboard 18 Konkurs antitank missiles,
54 BGM-71 antitank shells and 15 shell battery kits, the coalition said.
Pictures
of the boat distributed by the coalition showed a medium-size wooden
fishing vessel of a type commonly used in regional waters.
Write to Ahmed Al Omran at
Ahmed.AlOmran@wsj.com and Asa Fitch at
asa.fitch@wsj.com
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