"The United Arab Emirates and Israel are working on a plan to establish spy bases on the Yemeni island of Socotra," located between the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea, bloggers and researchers on US and French websites were adamantly claiming.
According to the unsubstantiated claims, which were published, among other places, on the news site Middle East Monitor and largely relied on reports from the French-Jewish site JForum, the two countries have already installed some espionage equipment on the island, which is situated some 350 kilometers (217 miles) south of the Yemeni mainland.
According to the reports, all the logistical preparations for building a base on Socotra, from which intelligence will be gathered throughout the Gulf of Aden, have been made. The reports also said the base's construction was dependent on the two countries normalizing relations.
The reports further claimed that Israeli and Emirati intelligence officers recently visited the island to examine various locations for the construction of additional intelligence bases, whose mission would be to collect information from the area and specifically the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait south of Yemen, along with the Gulf of Aden and the Horn of Africa.
