{The Australian navy says it has seized a huge cache of weapons on a fishing boat off the coast of Oman that was apparently heading for Somalia.}<\/p>\n
It said crew from one its warships found grenade launchers, machine guns and 2,000 assault rifles concealed under fishing nets.<\/p>\n
It is unclear who was transporting the weapons or who they were for.<\/p>\n
The Australian warship is part of an international naval force which is enforcing UN sanctions.<\/p>\n
Sailors from Australia’s HMAS Darwin boarded the vessel after they found it did not have a state flag for identification.<\/p>\n
They found weapons, including 100 rocket-propelled grenades thought to be worth a total of $2m (\u00a31.4m).<\/p>\n
Australian Vice-Admiral David Johnston said the size of the haul meant it was “highly significant”.<\/p>\n
Although heading towards Somalia when it was stopped, the boat would also have passed by the coast of Yemen, where there is also conflict.<\/p>\n
UN sanctions authorise the interception of weapons heading for Somalia, where the Islamist militant group al-Shabab is active.<\/p>\n
However, the UN allows the Somali government to buy light weapons for its fight against the Islamists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{The Australian navy says it has seized a huge cache of weapons on a fishing boat off the coast of Oman that was apparently heading for Somalia.} It said crew from one its warships found grenade launchers, machine guns and 2,000 assault rifles concealed under fishing nets. It is unclear who was transporting the weapons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-23755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23755\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23755"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=23755"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=23755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}