Iran's navy ships dock in Sudan after Israeli airstrike on missile base

PanARMENIAN.Net - An Iranian naval task force has docked in Sudan, carrying with it a "message of peace and security to neighbouring countries", BBC News reported citing Iranian state media.

The vessels, which include a corvette and freighter, set sail from Iran last month, the Irna news agency said.

Their arrival comes six days after explosions destroyed an arms factory in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum.

Sudan has complained to the UN that Israel bombed the factory, which is believed to have been operated by Iran.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the incident.

The location of the port was not given by Irna, but the semi-official Fars news agency said the task force had docked in Port Sudan.

The vessels reportedly left the southern Iranian port of Bandar Abbas for international waters in September.

Iranian vessels have been part of an international flotilla of warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden, near the entrance to the Red Sea, since 2008, when Somali pirates hijacked an Iranian-chartered cargo ship, MV Delight, off the coast of Yemen.

Iran made no connection between the task force's arrival and the explosions at the al-Yarmouk military depot and ammunition plant, which left two people dead.

However, unconfirmed reports over the weekend suggested the facility was being used by Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) to produce weapons for the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas.

It is alleged that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency found documents relating to Iranian and Sudanese weapons manufacture on a senior Hamas official it is accused of assassinating in Dubai in 2010.

Israel will not confirm any of the allegations officially, but it has carried out a series of raids inside Sudan down the years.

However, the Sudanese government said in May that one person had been killed after a car exploded in Port Sudan. That explosion resembled one last year which left two people dead and was blamed on an Israeli missile strike, it added, according to BBC News.