The Diplomat
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday prohibited the stopover in Spain of a ship transporting weapons destined for Israel, a decision “coherent” with Spain’s position of not granting new licenses for the export of war material to this country, as declared yesterday the minister, José Manuel Albares.
According to Ministry sources informed to the Europa Press agency, the Department of Albares does not grant “transit authorization to make a stopover in Spanish territory to any ship with a shipment of weapons destined for Israel.”
The ship in question, as reported by the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, through X, is the ‘Marianne Danica’, which “arrived on the 21st of this month” in Cartagena. The Danish-flagged ship left the port of Madras, India, on April 8. The last known position of her is the waters near Mauritania.
“It is the first time we do it, because it is the first time we detect a ship that is carrying a shipment of weapons to Israel and that wants to stop at a Spanish port,” Albares told reporters from Brussels.
“The policy is not to grant new export licenses for war material destined for Israel and this decision we have made to reject that scale is coherent and along the same lines,” he added. “Right now, the last thing the Middle East needs is more weapons, what it needs is peace,” the minister warned.
According to Albares, “Spain is going to participate in all the efforts for peace to return definitively, so that this immediate and permanent ceasefire that the entire civilian population of Gaza needs is fulfilled” and, therefore, “it is not going to participate in absolute in maintaining and promoting that war.”
Authorization to call at Spanish ports of general interest corresponds to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Department of Albares, on the other hand, did grant permission to dock in Cartagena to the ‘Bokrum’ ship, which according to an NGO was loaded with weapons and whose presence had been denounced by Podemos, because its final destination was not Israel, but the Czech Republic.
The Ministry of Defense “has made all the necessary inquiries” and, “as far as we know, it comes in legal conditions and the ship was not heading “to Israel, it is going to another EU country,” the minister declared to the press yesterday. , Margarita Robles, who specified that this had been conveyed the day before to the leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra.
