Missing Red Sea yacht turns up in Djibouti safely after attack - owner

A private yacht with three Russians and two Egyptians on board, which had been reported missing in the Red Sea off Yemen, turned up in Djibouti on Thursday after what the owner said was an attack by unknown gunmen, Reuters reports.

The 30 Minutes sent its last signal on Tuesday night off the coast of Jizan, a port in southern Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni border before appearing to go missing, owner Dmitriy Chuguevskiy had told Reuters.

“According to the people on board … they were going in international waters off Yemen. They were attacked from the Yemen side, shot at … but they managed to escape, even though there was substantial damage to the yacht,” Chuguevskiy said on Thursday.

Several vessels have been attacked, in recent years, off the coast of Yemen which has been torn apart by an eight-year conflict between the Iran-aligned Houthi group, which controls north Yemen and the coast near where the ship is believed to have been, and a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition which backs Yemen’s internationally recognised government.

The yacht managed to reach Eritrea, before finally making its way today to Djibouti, said Chuguevskiy, a Russian-Italian national based in the United Arab Emirates.

The ship had not been fitted with the standard AIS ship tracking system which shipping data trackers use, and its disappearance had also been reported by the Russian embassy in Saudi Arabia.

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