Israel seizes weapons-smuggling ship off coast (3rd Roundup)

Nov 4, 2009, 18:40 GMT

Tel Aviv - Israeli naval commandoes on Wednesday seized a cargo ship smuggling weapons from Iran to the Hezbollah guerrilla group in Lebanon, the military said.

The Antigua-flagged, German-owned Francop was stopped some 160 kilometres off the Israeli coast before dawn, military spokeswoman Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibowitz told the German Press Agency dpa.

After the ship was redirected to the southern Israeli port of Ashdod, 36 large shipping containers containing the arms were laid out on the dock.

Television footage broadcast on Israel's Channel 10 Wednesday evening showed hundreds of boxes with rockets, including 122- millimetre Russian-style Katyushas, as well as anti-tank and artillery shells, hand grenades and ammunition for semi-automatic weapons, worth an estimated tens of millions of dollars.

Commodore Rani Ben-Yehuda, the head of the Israeli Naval Staff, told reporters the amount was enough to sustain Hezbollah through one month of fighting with Israel.

He said it was more than ten times as much as was found on the Karine A, a Palestinian freighter intercepted by Israeli commandos in the Red Sea in 2002, with 50 tons of weapons earmarked for Gaza.

As many as 3,000 rockets and shells were found on the Francop, Israeli officials estimated, noting that Hezbollah, during the entire 33-day Lebanon war in 2006, fired some 4,000 projectiles at Israel.

The ship had been en route from the Egyptian Nile delta port of Damietta to the Mediterranean port of Latakia in western Syria, north of Lebanon, from where the arms shipments was to have made its way to Hezbollah, according to Israel.

The arms had come from the Gulf port of Bandar Abbas in Iran and were shipped through the Suez Canal, and then loaded onto the Francop at Damietta, the Israeli officials said.

Iran denied it had tried to ship arms to Hezbollah. Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying 'the report was not true. The ship was heading for Iran from Syria carrying Syrian goods, not weapons.'

But Israel said its intelligence had been monitoring the shipment since it left its port of departure days ago.

It was intercepted while passing through the Mediterranean off the coast of Israel, well outside Israeli territorial waters.

The crew of the Francop was unaware of the weapons, which were hidden inside the containers behind white bags with an agricultural product, and its Polish captain did not resist the Israeli interception.

'The weapons uncovered at sea last night constitute a harsh violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1747 and 1701 that strictly forbid Iran from exporting or trading any form of weapons,' the Israeli military said in a statement.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak briefed ministers on the capture and both he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu congratulated the Israeli security establishment on it.

President Shimon Peres said it provided unequivocal proof that arms smuggling to Hezbollah via Syria and from Iran was continuing.

'The entire world is witness today to the great gap between what Syria and Iran are saying and their actions in practice,' he told reporters while visiting a joint Israeli-US Air Force missile defence exercise currently being conducted in Israel.

'Both Iran and Syria are constantly arming terrorist organizations, first and foremost Hezbollah and (the radical Islamist Palestinian) Hamas,' he charged, according to a transcript from his office.

Since the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel has repeatedly complained that both Syria and Iran continue to supply Hezbollah with weapons, despite UN resolution 1701 which ended the war and imposed an arms embargo on the movement.

The German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, in a report to appear in its Thursday edition, said the owner of the Francop ship is the German shipping company Gerd Bartels.

But a company spokesman told the paper that the firm did not know what shipment was on board because the vessel had been chartered out to a Limassol, Cyprus-based company called United Feeder Services.