Report of UN experts: The Houthis did not carry out the Aramco attacks

Reuters revealed that a secret report of the United Nations Sanctions Committee concluded that the Houthi group in Yemen had not carried out the attacks that targeted major Saudi oil facilities in September 2019, which strengthens US accusations that Iran is responsible for those attacks.

Washington, European powers and Riyadh accused Tehran of carrying out the attacks of September 14 on the oil facilities of the Saudi oil giant "Aramco" in the Abqaiq and Khurais region in the east of the kingdom, refusing to claim the Houthis allied with Iran to be responsible for the attacks. Tehran has denied involvement in any attack.

"Despite its claims to the contrary, the Houthi forces have not carried out the attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais," said the report of the independent experts of the United Nations to the Security Council sanctions committee for Yemen. UN experts questioned that the drones and cruise missiles used to bomb Armco installations were able to travel the distance from the Houthi-controlled areas to the target location.

Weapons quality
The secret report added that the experts who monitor the implementation of sanctions on Yemen do not believe that the advanced weapons used in the Aramco attacks were manufactured inside Yemen, and concluded that the oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais were targeted from the northwest and northeast, not from the south.

The attacks on the oil factories in Abqaiq and Khurais had halted half of Saudi oil production, which is equivalent to 5% of daily global supplies, which pushed crude prices to rise in international markets, but Riyadh announced on October 3, 2019 that it had recovered its full capacity Productivity (more than 10 million barrels per day) after repairing the damage resulting from the attacks.

The Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Adel Al-Jubeir, announced after the September attacks that his country will wait for the results of the international investigations to reveal the way in which it will respond to the attacks.

The results of the UN report come amid escalating tension in the region, after the United States killed the prominent Iranian military leader Qasim Soleimani in a raid of a drone plane near Baghdad airport last Friday.