The Arab coalition fighting in Yemen said it foiled a booby-trapped boat attack by the Iran-backed Houthis (Ansarallah) on a commercial ship in the Red Sea on Monday (July 8th), AFP reported.
"The naval forces of the coalition managed to thwart an (attack) by the Houthi militia targeting a commercial ship in the southern waters of the Red Sea, using an unmanned booby-trapped boat," a coalition spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Saudi Press Agency.
"The coalition forces spotted the unmanned boat... then intercepted and destroyed it," he added.
The Houthis rejected the claim, calling it "completely baseless", according to the group's Al-Masirah TV.
Last year Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude exporter, halted exports through the Bab al-Mandeb strait as a result of a Houthi attack on a tanker in the strategic waterway, before resuming them 10 days later.
Bab al-Mandeb is a crucial shipping lane between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden.
More recent attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, which the US blamed on Iran, have spiked regional tensions.
