Bahraini authorities said Monday they have seized a boat smuggling explosives made in Iran and Syria into their country,
The boat, which had two Bahrainis aboard, was stopped over the weekend at two nautical miles (3.7 kilometres) off the archipelago’s coast, public security chief Major-General Tareq al-Hasan said.
He said it had been tracked over a distance of 118 nautical miles (218 kilometres) northeast of the kingdom.
“Fifty hand grenades made in Iran,” as well as “295 fuses connected to switches labelled as made in Syria,” were found in the 29-foot (nine-metre) vessel, he said in a statement carried by state news agency BNA.
Dozens of C4 and TNT explosive devices were also found on the boat, he said, without providing details about the source of the alleged shipment.
Hasan said that security forces also discovered a cache of explosives in a village outside Manama, dismantled a car bomb and arrested 13 wanted people, including a Saudi national, as they attempted to flee Bahrain in a boat.