A group of journalists have looked for evidence of war crime at the scene of a recent massacre of civilians, including children, during a Saudi Arabia-led strike that targeted a civilian home near Yemen’s border with the kingdom.
The Sky News team that identified itself as the first journalists to independently investigate the attack, “discovered evidence of a recent potential war crime in northern Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition, which is backed by the US and Britain,” the network reported on its website on Monday.
The attack saw a jet reaching the remote village of Washah before striking the home where only women and children were present at the time, while refusing to even “touch” any other nearby structure.
“No other home in the area was touched,” the network cited a relative as saying. A total of nine civilians were killed in the attack, six of them children.
The war has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis and rendered the country into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in an unsuccessful attempt to restore power to Yemen’s former Saudi-allied officials.
The ammunition used in the bombing against the village was identified as US-made 500-pound (230-kilogram) GBU-12 Paveway II bomb. Around this time last year, UK-based rights body Amnesty International likewise revealed that the same type of ammunition, manufactured by US company Raytheon, had been used in an airstrike on Yemen’s southwestern province of Ta’izz, killing six people, including three children.
Amnesty International says precision-guided bombs made by the United States have been used in Saudi-led deadly airstrikes against civilians in Yemen.
The bomb that is used for precision strikes has been regularly dropped on the Arab world’s poorest nation in the course of the Saudi-led war. This is while the invading coalition claims that it refuses to deliberately target civilians.
Following the attack on the village, the jet was still circling for around 15 minutes above the site, the Sky News report said, pointing to a common practice by the coalition’s warplanes that is apparently aimed at scaring relief workers and others trying to help away from the places that have just been attacked.
After the United States, the UK and France rank among the biggest supporters of the war, likewise providing the invading coalition with arms as well as logistical and political backing.
Sky News said, “There’s already growing controversy over why Britain is still supporting the campaign.”
The Amnesty has also found the Western trio to be complicit in the war crimes that have been committed by the coalition against the Yemeni people.
