Yeah… it's CNN, but this sounds legit…

UPDATE ON FUJAIRAH UAE TANKER "SABOTAGE" ATTACKS

…WHAT WE KNOW

What we are learning so far is that at 6.35 a.m. Sunday morning, a call was made by a ship reporting something wrong with its engine, that there seemed to be water in the engine room.

By 8 a.m., Emirati authorities realized four ships were struggling with unexplained incidents. On several of those vessels, water was getting in below the water line.

The four vessels that were damaged were the Saudi-flagged Almarzoqah and Amjad, the UAE-flagged A. Michel and the Norway-flagged Andrea Victory. I have seen all of them except the Amjad.

The Emirati tanker Michel was clearly listing and heavier at the stern than bow appearing to have taken on water, with several smaller vessels clustered around its heaviest corner.

Around the rear of the 243m-long Saudi tanker the Marzoqah, I saw four US-flagged armoured naval speed boats carrying out what seemed to be inspections.

All appeared to have been targeted at their rear, an area that maritime experts say is the most vulnerable part of a vessel. It is the hardest area to cover by radar, and the most difficult to see with the naked eye.

An attack on those vessels from that angle would suggest that the culprit knew what they were doing, and that the damage was precisely what they intended. Holes big enough to take on water but not large enough to sink the ships.

In other words, a momentarily painful message, but not a declaration of war.

One weapons expert who reviewed images of some of the damage thinks the holes may have been caused by limpet mines, which are used at or below the water line, easily stuck to the hull by a diver or attacker in a small boat, and detonated by a timer.

He based his analysis on the size of the hole, consistent with a 5kg charge (about the amount of explosives in a Limpet mine) and the lack of scorching or burning a rocket or missile might leave.

He described it as a sophisticated operation, with the culprit getting clean away, a professional job.

A picture emerges of well-trained operatives moving across the water under cover of darkness, placing mines on selected ships over a wide area. If Limpet mines can be blamed, they would have been timed to go off within a few hours of each other in the morning, with no sight nor sound of attacker ever detected.

It is quite possible no one on board would have heard the explosions and the first sign of trouble could well have been water inside the ship, as indicated in the calls ashore.

Nothing like this has been seen around Fujairah before. However, off the coast of nearby Yemen, where Iranian-backed Houthis are fighting the Saudi-and-UAE-backed Yemeni government, Houthis have used mines to target Saudi ships. On Tuesday, Houthis claimed responsibility for a bold drone attack on an oil pipeline deep inside Saudi Arabia.

But even if a forensic match could be made between past Houthi mine attacks and the sabotage at Fujairah this Sunday, there'd be little to prove that Iran was behind it or even knew about it.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/15/middleeast/sabotage-attack-analysis-intl/index.html