Fishermen find dead sperm whale and cut open its belly: what was inside made them millionaires | the Chronicle

It was a day like any other when a group of 35 fishermen went by boat to look for the daily bread in a country at war. (South of Yemen), until you notice something strange in the sea: the corpse of a gray cetacean. Within minutes, they dragged it to shore and sliced ​​it, not imagining the biggest prize was inside.

Inside they found a “floating gold” or ambergris, a rare substance formed in the digestive system of the whale which is widely used in the manufacture of perfumes. The piece weighed 127 kilograms and was sold to a businessman from United Arab Emirates for more than 1.5 million dollars, a sum never seen before for the majority of the inhabitants of Yemen, one of the countries with the highest rate of poverty according to the UNO. “I go out to sea every day to do my catch and one of these days I find a dead whale. And it turns out it was filled with ambergris“, He said the Yemeni fisherman Abdulhakeem prices.

Although the fishermen used part of the money to help the people of the Nation, the rest was distributed among its members and it was enough for them to become millionaires. “Some bought boats, some built or repaired their houses. I built my house, I built my future (…) The circumstances here are difficult “, assured the fisherman

Millions of people in Yemen have been dragged into famine after years of civil war, which erupted in 2014 between the government backed by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels. The life of the fishing group changed overnight and Such a stroke of luck has never been seen in the Republic of Yemen.

The conflict has left tens of thousands dead, millions displaced and two-thirds of its 30 million inhabitants dependent on some form of aid. Salim Sharf, another of the fishermen, also testified to AFP: “We are humble people, fishermen who seek our catch every day. If you catch today’s catch, you give thanks to God.“.