Group: Airstrike in Yemen is ‘apparent war crime’

CAIRO — An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi rebels in Yemen that killed dozens of people last month is an “apparent war crime,” an international rights group said Sunday.

The report came days after U.N. human rights experts said all sides in the fighting may have been responsible for committing war crimes in the 3½-year conflict.

The coalition backing Yemen’s internationally recognized government expressed regret Saturday and pledged to hold accountable those found to be responsible for the airstrike, which hit a bus carrying children in a busy market in the northern province of Saada. At least 51 people, including 40 children, were killed, and 79 others, including 56 children, were wounded.

Human Rights Watch said the attack adds to the coalition’s “already gruesome track record of killing civilians at weddings, funerals, hospitals and schools in Yemen.”

The New York-based group said it spoke by phone to 14 witnesses, including nine children, who said that shortly before 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 9, a bomb fell on the market in Dhahyan, a town north of Saada in Houthicontrolled northwestern Yemen, 60 kilometers from the Saudi border.

The bomb landed a few meters from a bus packed with boys on an excursion organized by a mosque to visit the graves of men who had been killed in fighting, the group said. The bus was parked outside a grocery store where the driver had gone to buy water for the children, HRW said.

“I saw bodies torn into pieces, pieces of my friends . ... Many of my friends died,” the group quoted Ahmad Hanash, 14, as saying. He and his brothers Hassan, 13, and Yahia, 11, were wounded in the attack.

Bill Van Esveld, senior children’s rights researcher for HRW, urged the U.S. and other countries to “immediately stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and support strengthening the independent U.N. inquiry into violations in Yemen, or risk being complicit in future atrocities.”