SANAA, Oct 6: A boat packed with explosives rammed and badly holed a French supertanker off Yemen on Sunday, a week before the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US warship Cole, the French embassy said.

“The oil tanker was rammed by a small boat stuffed with explosives,” as it came by an offshore terminal in the Arabian Sea, vice consul Marcel Goncalves told newsmen.

“It seems to be an attack in the same style as the USS Cole,” he said of the hi-tech destroyer bombed by suspected Al Qaeda militants in Aden harbour on Oct 12, 2000. Seventeen US sailors died and 38 were wounded.

A gaping hole was blown into the side of the 330-metre-long (1,100-foot-long) tanker “Limburg” managed by the company “France Shipmanagement”, the embassy said.

“It is sinking, if it has not already sunk,” Goncalves said of the French tanker located some 700 kilometres (450 miles) east of Aden.

The embassy said 12 of the 25-man crew had been hospitalized with injuries.

Yemeni officials said all hands had been rescued.

In France, Limburg owners Euronav, based outside Nantes on the Atlantic coast, said it appeared to be an attack which had left one of ]17 Bulgarian crew missing.

“For us it’s deliberate. Because to cut through the first hull of this double-hulled oil tanker, which is in good condition and only two years old, you need a very, very strong force,” Euronav director Jacques Moizan told AFP.