An "oil spot" has been seen near the floating storage and offloading vessel abandoned offshore Yemen and tabbed by environmentalists as a floating bomb.
Saudi Arabia reportedly brought the spot — 50km west of the 407,000-dwt Safer (built 1976) — to the attention of the UN Security Council in a letter on Wednesday, Reuters reported.
The ship has been stranded for five years and carries more than 1m barrels of oil.
"A pipeline attached to the vessel is suspected to have been separated from the stabilizers holding it to the bottom and is now floating on the surface of the sea," Saudi Arabia's UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi wrote.
Over the summer, UN authorities were pushing to inspect the vessel, but their efforts were complicated by the ongoing civil war in Yemen.
The ship is 4.8 nautical miles off Ras Isa, a city controlled by Houthi rebels, who have not appeared keen to allow access to the ship without payment as the cargo is potentially worth tens of millions.
Both the Houthis and Yemen's Saudi Arabian-backed government-in-exile claim ownership of the cargo.
In July, UN humanitarian affairs chief Mark Lowcock said he saw two potential scenarios for the Safer: A smaller-scale oil spill caused by corrosion or a "catastrophic scenario" where almost all of the oil spills into the Red Sea after an explosion on board.
Meanwhile, the ship has continued to deteriorate, with an oil leak reported in December 2019 and engine pipes said to be corroded in June.
The UN has warned a spill from the tanker could dump four times more oil thank the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska.
"[The Safer] has reached a critical state of degradation, and that the situation is a serious threat to all Red Sea countries, particularly Yemen and Saudi Arabia," Al-Mouallmi wrote.
