Word: suez
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Since nobody has yet managed to locate the "smoking gun," as some diplomats put it, there was no certain way to determine just which country or group is responsible for what appeared to be an elaborate act of terrorism and harassment. In the beginning, Egypt, which operates the Suez Canal, had two prime suspects, Iran and Libya. The Iranian government of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini was known to be angry and frustrated over its inability to stop its enemy Iraq from attacking tankers using Iranian oil facilities in the Persian Gulf. The Iranians were also upset about Iraq...
...ships and helicopters of three nations-the U.S., Britain and France-joined the search last week, but the mystery of the Red Sea mines remained unsolved. As the toll of vessels damaged by explosions while sailing either to or from the Suez Canal reached 19, British and French ships and U.S. helicopters were hard at work trying to locate and identify one or more of the mines that were presumed to be causing the trouble. By week's end none had been recovered, though a Cairo newspaper reported that an Egyptian team had detonated a mine...
...sworn enemy of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, as the prime suspect. Central to this view is the fact that a Libyan cargo ship, the Ghat, entered the northern end of the canal on July 6, then traveled southward through the canal and the Gulf of Suez to the Ethiopian port of Assab on the Red Sea, where it unloaded its cargo and eventually headed back toward the canal. According to Egyptian officials, that round trip should have taken the Ghat about eight days. In fact, it took 15 days. Long before the Ghat left the canal...
...proving Libya's guilt is something else. Mubarak knew that Egypt's twelve aging minesweepers were not capable of clearing the entire Red Sea, or even the Gulf of Suez, or of finding and identifying unexploded mines. So he turned to the U.S. for help. The Reagan Administration has subsequently been accused by the Soviet Union and some radical Middle Eastern states of using the problem as a way to force more U.S. naval power into the region. The Soviet news agency Novosti declared that Washington was "tempted by the idea of turning the Red Sea into...
...wooden hulls to reduce the risk of setting off magnetic mines. France has sent four minesweepers and two support ships to the region. The U.S. dispatched four Sea Stallion helicopters and a contingent of about 200 men aboard the Shreveport, an amphibious transport vessel that entered the Gulf of Suez at midweek. The Shreveport joined the U.S. oceanographic ship the Harkness, where 15 mine-warfare experts were already at work. Later the U.S. sent three helicopters to Saudi Arabia at the Saudis' request. Italian vessels were due in the area this week...