SAN'A -- A boat packed with explosives rammed and badly holed a French supertanker off Yemen on Sunday, a week before the second anniversary of the terrorist attack on the U.S. Warship Cole, the French Embassy said.

Twelve of the 25 crew had been "recovered" and hospitalized with injuries, but the others remained unaccounted for.

Sixteen of the crew were Bulgarian.

"The oil tanker was rammed by a small boat stuffed with explosives," as it came by an off-shore terminal in the Arabian Sea, Vice Consul Marcel Goncalves told AFP.

"It seems to be an attack in the same style as the USS Cole," he said of the destroyer blown up by suspected Al-Qaeda militants in Aden harbor almost exactly two years ago on October, 12, 2000.

Seventeen U.S. sailors died and 38 were wounded.

A gaping hole was blown into the side of the tanker "Linbourg", owned by the company "French Ship Management", the diplomat said.

"It is sinking, if it has not already sunk," Goncalves added of the French tanker located some 700 kilometers (450 miles) east of Aden.

The vessel, carrying 397,000 barrels of crude from Iran's Kharj Terminal, was to add a further 1.5 million barrels of Yemeni oil from Mina al-Thabah, an official with the Hadramaut local government said.

The ship was now located just off Ar-Riyan Airport, outside the city of Al-Mukalla, 700 kilometers (450 miles) east of Aden, a correspondent at the scene reported.

A huge pall of smoke blew over the Al-Mukalla area.

The Hadramaut governorate released a statement saying the explosion was caused "when the reservoirs filled with crude caught fire with the vessel three nautical miles from the offshore terminal of Al-Thabah.

"The situation is difficult aboard the ship and thick columns of smoke are rising into the air.

"Efforts are under way to save the other members of the crew and bring the fire under control," said the statement carried by the official Saba news agency.

The trial of Yemenis implicated in the bombing of the Cole is set to open in Aden in the coming days after San'a agreed with U.S. officials to bring the suspects to court, a government official said at the end of September.

MP Sultan Hazzam al-Atwani that that more than 100 people are being held in Yemen on suspicion of terrorism links, including 15 in the bombing of the Cole.

No one has yet been tried for the Cole bombing, an attack linked to the Al-Qaeda terror network, whose leader Osama bin Laden claims Yemen as his ancestral home.

At the start of September, Yemeni authorities freed a suspect in the Cole affair in a bid to secure his help in tracking down other Islamic militants, a source close to the suspect said.

Bashir al-Shaddadi, released after two years behind bars, was "entrusted ... with a specific task, which is to talk some of the presumed Islamic jihad and Al-Qaeda members he knows into giving themselves up to the authorities," the source said.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has urged suspected Al-Qaeda fighters hiding out in Yemen to surrender to the authorities, promising they would not be delivered to the United States.

At Washington's insistence, Yemeni police and army forces began in late 2001 tracking down suspected members of the group in the provinces.

The crackdown targeted chiefly those known to have spent time in Afghanistan in the past three years, and many arrests were made.

Saleh has deployed troops mainly around suspected Al-Qaeda strongholds in the country's northeast, while the U.S. military has been sent to assist in the training of the Yemeni Army.