Two pilots of the United Arab Emirates have been killed after one of the country’s fighter jets participating in the Saudi-led aggression against Yemen crashed in the impoverished country, a report says.
The Saudi-led coalition made the announcement in a statement on Monday after the UAE armed forces said in a statement earlier in the day that the warplane could not be located.
"The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces announced today that a fighter jet taking part in the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia... in Yemen was missing," said a statement on the official WAM news agency, without giving further details.
CNN Arabic reported that the fighter jet crashed due to a technical fault.
Meanwhile, al-Masdar Online quoted a Yemeni official as saying that the Apache jet crashed in Aden due to technical fault while it was conducting an airstrike. The warplane reportedly hit a mountain and crashed on a residential house, leaving a child dead.
Several Saudi aircraft have been downed in Yemen by the country’s army and popular committees since the beginning of the Saudi aggression in March last year, and at least two coalition jets have crashed in the impoverished country.
In May 2015, the Yemeni forces shot down a Moroccan F-16 warplane. In December that year, a Bahraini F-16 jet crashed on the Saudi Arabian side of the border with Yemen in the northern Saudi province of Jizan, after suffering a technical problem.
Yemeni army troops and allied Houthi Ansarullah fighters have also managed to bring down a number of Saudi drones.
On March 5, a Saudi spy drone was downed while it was flying over the country’s southern province of Ibb.
On February 27, Yemeni soldiers and allied forces also targeted an Emirati drone in the sky over the town of Azan, located 550 kilometers (341 miles) southeast of Sana’a. The downed aircraft was purportedly on a surveillance mission in the area.
Yemeni army forces and fighters from Popular Committees shot down a Saudi spy aircraft over Harad district in the northwestern province of Hajjah on February 3. A few days earlier, Yemeni troops had fired a surface-to-air missile at another Saudi spy drone in Yemen’s northwestern Sa’ada Province.
Yemen has been under military attacks by Saudi Arabia since late March last year. At least 8,400 people, among them 2,236 children, have been killed so far in the aggression and 16,015 others sustained injuries. The strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the impoverished country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.