Alwaght- Two United Arab Emirates pilots have been killed after their warplane crashed in Yemen, where Saudi-led coalition has been conducting a one-year brutal aggression against the impoverished country.
The Mirage aircraft crashed at dawn “due to a technical fault”, said a coalition statement published hours after the United Arab Emirates reported one of its jets missing without giving details.
It is the first known case of an Emirati jet from the coalition crashing since the brutal campaign against Yemeni people began last March.
The UAE jet is the third Saudi-led aggressors’ warplane to go down since last March. In December a Bahraini F-16 crashed in Saudi Arabia due to what was claimed to be a “technical error”. In May a Moroccan jet crashed in Yemen. Its pilot was later found dead and his body was returned home. The coalition said at the time that the crash had been caused by a technical fault or human error. Yemeni resistance forces say they had downed the plane.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which play key roles in the coalition, have suffered the alliance’s heaviest losses in Yemen, with hundreds of their troops killed and others captured.
Yemeni army troops and allied Houthi Ansarullah fighters have also managed to shoot down a number of Saudi spy drones and Apache helicopters.
Elsewhere Saudi warplanes launched on Monday many air raids on Taiz province in Yemen.
The airstrikes targeted Softel area in al-Hawban Street, al-Kadaha in Mocha district and Shara'ab junction in Taiz. Other deadly airstrikes were carried out in Sana’a, Baidha, Shabwa and Ma’rib provinces.
Since the beginning of the deadly campaign of the Riyadh regime in March 2015, Saudi Arabia has claimed that its attacks are meant to hit members of the Ansarullah movement.
This is while over 8,500 people, mostly civilians and among them over 2,300 children, have been killed and almost 16,100 others injured since the onset of the aggression. The strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, factories and mosques.