ISTANBUL: Iranian natural gas flows to Turkey were halted after an explosion and could take up to a week to resume after repairs are completed, officials at the Turkish pipeline operator Botas said on Wednesday.
It was the second time in a little over a month that an explosion halted gas imports from Iran on the key link.
"The fire has been extinguished, and repair work is ongoing," one official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Another Botas official said the blast, the cause of which was not immediately clear, occurred late on Tuesday. Repairs could take six to seven days to be completed, he said.
When an explosion on July 21 halted gas flows, it took 10 days to fix the pipeline. The cause of that blast was also not known.
Officials did not say on which side of the border the blast occurred.
Guerrillas from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) have in the past claimed responsibility for attacks on oil pipelines from Iraq and Azerbaijan.
Neighboring Iran is Turkey’s second-biggest supplier of natural gas after Russia, sending 10 billion cubic meters of gas each year. Turkey uses gas to fire half of its power plants.
Meanwhile, Turkey is to remove Iran from a watch list of nations it considers a specific threat to its national security, a news report said Monday, amid Western concerns of rapprochement between the two countries.
The updated list is contained in Turkey’s security review produced by the country’s National Security Council which will be adopted in October and will no longer refer to Iran as a "specific threat", the Milliyet newspaper said.
The review replaces a previous edition published five years ago, the newspaper added.
Members of the council, made up of government and military leaders, were not immediately available for comment on the report on Iran, which Western nations accuse of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
The new document also downgrades the security threat presented by traditional rival Greece, Milliyet reported. The two countries have long-standing territorial differences but ties have improved recently in the commercial field.
The updated review mentions Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons program and repeats Turkey’s diplomatic line that it favors a nuclear-free Middle East, in a statement taken as a reference to Israel which is believed to hold the region’s only nuclear weapons arsenal.
Turkey’s improved ties with Iran have caused concern in the West. Turkey, a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, upset the United States and its Western allies when it opposed a resolution to impose new sanctions on Iran that was adopted by the Security Council in June.
The Islamist-rooted government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that it retains its strong ties to the West even as it seeks deeper relations with its Middle East neighbors and Asia.
At the same time Turkey’s relations with Israel have been strained, notably by the May 31 Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship.
Turkey threatened to sever ties completely following the deadly raid unless Israel apologized, a step the Israelis refused to take.
