Saudi rejects interference in Yemen: King Salman

Rebel leader accuses UK of war crimes

RIYADH, Dec 14, (Agencies): Saudi Arabia is determined to prevent external “interference” in neighbouring war-torn Yemen, King Salman said in an annual address on Thursday.

He did not explicitly refer to the kingdom’s regional rival Iran but Saudi officials have accused Tehran and the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah of aiding rebels in Yemen.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia has itself led an Arab coalition conducting air strikes against the Shiite Houthi rebels and providing other assistance to local forces in support of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

“We will not accept any interference in the internal affairs of Yemen”, King Salman said in an address opening a new session of the Shura Council, an appointed body which advises cabinet.

Salman said his country will neither accept that Yemen “becomes a base or a point of passage for whatever state or party to menace the security or the stability of the kingdom and of the region”.

The Saudi-led coalition intervened after Houthi rebels allied with elite members of the security forces loyal to Yemen’s former president Ali Abdullah Saleh seized the capital Sanaa and overran other parts of the country.

The rebels have killed at least 110 civilians and soldiers in rocket fire and skirmishes along the Saudi frontier. They have also fired longer-range ballistic missiles over the border at Saudi Arabia.

International investigators last month said they had found a suspected “weapon pipeline” from Iran through Somalia to Yemen.

British-based Conflict Armament Research, which is primarily funded by the European Union, analysed photographs of weapons including assault rifles and rocket launchers to draw its conclusions.

Tehran has repeatedly denied sending arms to Yemeni rebels.

Meanwhile, the leader of Yemen’s rebel Houthi government on Wednesday accused Britain of war crimes by supplying weapons that Saudi-led forces were using to “bomb the people”.

Abdel Aziz bin Habtoor said Britain had “sold cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia” that it knew would be dropped on Shiite Houthi rebels fighting the internationally-recognised, Saudi-backed administration of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

“I don’t think they are guilty of war crimes, I believe so,” he told broadcaster Sky News. “They are participating in the bombing of Yemen people.”

In response to a parliamentary question about the allegations, Prime Minister Theresa May told MPs that Britain had a “very strict regime for export licences in relation to weapons”.

“We exercise that very carefully, and in recent years we have indeed refused export licences in relation to arms, including to Yemen and Saudi Arabia,” she added.

“Where there are allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law, then we require those to be properly investigated.”

The United States on Tuesday blocked the transfer of precision munitions to ally Saudi Arabia, amid anger about the civilian death toll from the kingdom’s bombing campaign in Yemen.

“This reflects our continued, strong concerns with the flaws in the coalition’s targeting practices and overall prosecution of the air campaign in Yemen,” said the White House.

Eleven headless bodies have been dumped in a nature reserve in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden, a local news website reported on Wednesday.

The Aden al-Ghad news website quoted a security source in the city as saying that the male bodies were found on Tuesday evening in the al-Hiswa reserve, west of Aden.

It was not immediately clear who killed the men and why, but Aden alGhad said the condition of the bodies suggested they had been dumped there more than a month ago.

Yemen’s second largest city has been suffering from lawlessness, as armed groups including Islamic State and al-Qaeda continue to maintain influence nearly a year and-a-half after supporters of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, backed by Arab coalition troops, drove the Iran-aligned Houthis out.