11/09/2000 07:40:55 ET
Russia was involved in attack on USS Cole, Arab report says

Nicosia (dpa) - The sophisticated explosives used in attacking the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden last month came from Russia via Iraq, an authoritative Arab news magazine said Thursday.

The Paris-based Al-Watan Al-Arabi quoted reports filtering from Western intelligence agencies as saying that the explosives, ``which were of a type available only to Russia and the former East Germany'', had been smuggled to Iraq on one of the early Russian flights that broke the U.N. air embargo on Baghdad.

``The explosives were then transported to Yemen aboard a Yemeni plane by an Iraqi team that received training on how to use them,'' said the report. ``They were taken directly by truck from Sanaa to Aden in an operation that smacked of collusion by some senior Yemeni officials, thus the Yemeni attempt to mislead rather than help U.S. investigators.''

The report said that the explosives could not have been obtained through the international Russian mafia because ``a large quantity was used through a technology available only to big powers''.

It quoted sources as saying Russia's involvement - which threatens to resuscitate the cold war era from Aden, ``was precipitated by watertight evidence obtained by Moscow that a U.S. submarine was behind the recent sinking of the Soviet submarine Kursk''.

The Gulf of Aden and the port saw an increased Soviet naval presence after the 1967 withdrawal of British forces.

The October 13 attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden tore a 40ft hole into the ship's hull, and left 17 sailors dead, or missing and presumed dead.

The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk went down in the Barents Sea on 12 August with 118 men on board, and the Russian navy has claimed that this was after a collision with a NATO submarine.

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