re: #46 ggt

Egypt says that no Iranian warships have gone through the Suez.

“No Iranian war vessels have passed through the Suez Canal today and not yesterday,” the authority’s head of traffic, Ahmed El Manakhly, told Bloomberg Television in an interview. “We didn’t have any requests for any Iranian vessels to pass through the canal.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Iran was planning late yesterday to send two gunboats through the canal to Syria, which would involve sailing through the eastern Mediterranean, off Israel’s coast.

Concern that anti-government unrest in Egypt would disrupt canal traffic sent oil prices to a two-year high on Feb. 2. The 120-mile (190-kilometer) Suez Canal carries about 2.5 percent of world oil output, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and is a key route for ships carrying Asian consumer goods to Europe.