Millennium Post

Weapons used in Saudi attacks 'came from Iran': Coalition

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RIYADH: The weapons used to strike two Saudi oil plants were provided by the kingdom's arch-foe Iran, the Riyadh-led coalition fighting in Yemen said on Monday.

"The investigat­ion is continuing and all indication­s are that weapons used in both attacks came from Iran," coalition spokesman Turki al-maliki told reporters in Riyadh, adding they were now probing "from where they were fired".

The Tehran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen, where a coalition is bogged down in a fiveyear war, claimed Saturday's strikes on two facilities owned by state energy giant Aramco which sent shock waves across oil markets.

But US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has pointed the finger squarely at Tehran, saying there was no evidence the "unpreceden­ted attack on the world's energy supply" was launched from Yemen.

"This strike didn't come from Yemen territory as the Huthi militia are pretending," Maliki said, adding that an investigat­ion was ongoing into the attacks and their origins.

He labelled the Huthis "a tool in the hands of the Iranian Revolution­ary Guards and the terrorist regime of Iran".

Trump has raised the possibilit­y of military retaliatio­n after the strikes, saying Sunday that Washington was "locked and loaded" to respond.

Oil prices rocketed on Monday after the strikes on Abqaiq, the world's largest oil processing facility, and the Khurais oil field in eastern Saudi Arabia knocked out nearly half of the top crude exporter's production.

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