Yemen anti-terror police foil $2m theft from Canadian oil company

Yemen anti-terror police thwarted on Thursday an electronic attempt to steal about $2 million from a Canadian oil company working in Yemen.

"The anti-terror police in the city of Sanaa foiled an attempt to stea more than $1.7 million from the Canadian Nexen and 460,000 Saudi riyals from a Yemeni bank," a state-run newspaper quoted a responsible source in Interior Ministry as declaring.

The source, however, did not point out whether the robbers had contacts with terrorist groups.

Three men, the source added, were arrested after they had withdrawn $740,000 out of $1.7 million from the Nexen Company's account in collusion with the computer officer in the company who transferred the money to the company's account in Canada, then to a Washington-based bank, then to Malaysia, and eventually to a commercial bank in Sanaa.

Further, the robbers withdrew 460,000 Saudi riyals from the same bank to which the remittance has just arrived after they had played an electronic trick on the bank's computers, and all this took them only minutes, the source explained.

The accused, two of whom were in Malaysia and one in Sanaa, could have decoded Nexen's financial accounts by entering the Internet and dropping the sum and transferring it to their interest, to the order of 'Abdullah Mohammed AlQarmani', a forged named used by the robber in Sanaa.

They also replaced the sender's name with a forged name of one of the two men who carried out the operation in Malaysia.

The three accused conspired with one of the Nexen company's officers, who is their relative, to steal the $740,000. Police now are looking for the company officer who is still at large.