Karine A
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The Karin A (also Karine A) was a 4,000 ton freighter intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on January 3, 2002 carrying a wide variety of weapons. While the ship itself was worth an estimated $400,000 and the civilian cargo used to conceal the weapons approximately $3,000,000, the weapons were reportedly purchased for approximately $15,000,000. The IDF claimed the ship was owned by the Palestinian Authority, and that the arms were bound for their use.
The equipment included Katyusha rockets, mortars, sniper rifles, bullets, anti-tank mines, anti-tank missiles, as well as over two and a half tons of pure explosives. According to Maj. Gen. Yedidya Yaari, the commander of the Israeli Navy, they were packed in 83 crates in waterproof plastic and attached to buoys, to permit their drop-off and retrieval at sea.
The mission began at 04:45 of January 3 in the Red Sea, 300 miles from Israel. Israeli Navy commandos, backed by combat helicopters and aircraft, surprised the crew and took over the vessel without firing a single bullet. The ship was taken to Eilat the night of January 4.
Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israeli Army announced in a Tel Aviv news conference on January 4 that the army had seized the ship while General Anthony Zinni was meeting with Yasser Arafat to promote negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The captain of the vessel was Omar Akawi, a Fatah activist since 1976 and a former member of the Palestinian Authority who left the organization two years previously disillusioned with its direction. The reported purchaser of the weapons, Adel Salameh (aka Adel 'Moghrabi`, because he carries a Moroccan passport) also was a former member of Yassir Arafat's staff until the 1980s.
Israeli reports state that the ship, purchased from Lebanon, loaded up weapons at the island of Kish in the middle of the night off the coast of Iran. It then sailed through the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea. This was revised from an earlier report that the ship was purchased in Bulgaria and loaded at the smaller island of Qeshim. Both locations are problematic in that neither island has a harbor that can handle ships as large as 4,000 tons. A night loading from an island off of Iran's coast would furthermore seem to imply that it was desired by the participants that the Iranian government not know about the transaction. The New York Times reported on January 5th that the US "assumed that the ship originated in Iran", and admitted that they only began tracking the ship at sea. On January 14th, the Times further reported that the matchup between the ship, Iran, and the Palestinian Authority was made by matching "a shopping list of advanced weapons" drawn up "more than a year ago" by "senior officials" of the Palestinian Authority.
According to Lloyd's List, which tracks worldwide shipping records, the ship belongs to Iraqi Ali Mohammed Abbas, who purchased it on August 31st, 2001 from a Lebanese company. It was renamed from "Rim K" to "Karine A" when it was registered in Tonga on September 12th. Tonga has confirmed that Abbas is still the owner of the ship.
Some, including Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, have raised doubts about the accuracy of the story. The concept that an unidentified ship carrying illegal arms could travel through a waterway in which the US routinely monitors and boards ships looking for smuggled Iraqi oil and goods, through the Red Sea (which the U.S. Naval Observatory monitors intensely since the USS Cole bombing), through water monitored by Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the approach to the Suez Canal, raised questions. The plan to then pass through inspections at the Suez canal and make it to Gaza (where Palestinian fishermen are not even currently allowed to go to sea) to then offload 50 tons of weapons raised more questions. Supporters of the Israeli report have pointed out that weapons have been delivered in the past via floating them in barrels at the right time for the tides to take them ashore, such as the case of the Santorini, so while the ship would have needed to make it past the Suez Canal, it would not have needed to make it to port.
It has been also suggested that the ship actually instead was bound for Hezbollah. Iranian supporters of Hezbollah have typically supplied the group via airplane, but airspace restrictions have severely limited their ability to do this. Iran has no diplomatic ties to the Palestinian Authority and opposes the Oslo Accords. However, this contradicts the testimony given by Akawi, who furthermore claims that he had been training in Libya during his time since leaving the Palestinian Authority (a claim denied by Libya).
External links and references
- Israel Seizes Ship It Says Was Arming Palestinians, The New York Times, January 5, 2002 (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/05/international/middleeast/05MIDE.html) (requires registration)
- A Reuters interview with the ship's captain, Omar Akkawi (http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=worldnews&StoryID=497498&fromEmail=true).
- Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing (http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0l0k0)
- Weapons Found on 'Karine-A' and 'Santorini' (http://www.waronline.org/en/analysis/pal_weapons.htm)