SANAA, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Houthi militia has reached an agreement with the United Nations (UN) to deal with a rusting oil tanker carrying over 1 million barrels of crude oil off the war-torn country's Red Sea coast.
"A memorandum of understanding has been signed with the United Nations for the Safer tanker," Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, head of the Houthi supreme revolutionary committee, said on Twitter on Saturday.
Last month, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly said he had held "very constructive discussions" with senior representatives of the Houthis on the Yemeni oil tanker Safer threatening to spill.
"They agreed in principle on how to move forward with the UN-coordinated proposal," he said in a brief statement without providing further details.
The rusting tanker has been stranded off the port city of Hodeidah for seven years since the eruption of the civil war, and the UN has repeatedly warned it was in imminent danger of leakage.
The Houthi militia had previously obstructed UN efforts to send inspectors to assess the tanker's condition or offload it.
