Six people were killed in a Houthi attack on a vessel in the Bab el-Mandeb, Yemeni authorities said, as Pakistan’s Mohsin Naqvi arrived in Tehran for talks on the Iran conflict and Strait of Hormuz.
In a new statement, Yemen's coastguard on Tuesday said four sailors aboard the cargo vessel -- identified as the "Tihamah" -- were among the dead along with two members of the forces deployed during a rescue mission to evacuate the ship.
The initial salvo targeting the ship "caused a fire to break out aboard the vessel and inflicted extensive damage, in addition to causing deaths and injuries among its crew, including three Pakistani nationals and one Indonesian national killed," the coastguard said in a statement.
Earlier, Yemen's transport ministry said Houthi rebels fired three ballistic missiles at the Yemeni commercial vessel before launching an additional missile at rescue teams attempting to reach it.
The attack follows the collapse last month of a years-long truce between the Iran-backed Houthis and Yemen’s internationally recognised government, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.
It comes as Pakistan’s Mohsin Naqvi has arrived in Tehran for talks with Iranian officials as the country's defence minister, Khawaja Asif, told Bloomberg News in an interview published on Tuesday that the United States and Iran are close to "some sort of an arrangement."
"Things are shaping up again in favour of a peace arrangement or a deal," Asif told Bloomberg News. "The signals in the last two three days are that we are close to some sort of an arrangement," he added.
Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is insisting that the Strait of Hormuz will not be reopened until the US meets its conditions, after Trump said he wants compensation from Iran “for all of the people that they have killed” in the past.
Araghchi told reporters that Iran has “astonished the whole world” in the war against the United States and Israel, proving “that it is a tough and invincible power.”
Iran effectively closed the strait by threatening shipping after Israel and the US attacked the country on 28 February.