Saudi-led coalition identifies Yemeni attack UAV

The Saudi-led coalition has revealed the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that it said was involved in an attempted attack on a Yemeni government delegation heading for a ceasefire meeting on 11 January.

A slide shown in a 19 January 2019 Saudi-led coalition briefing shows the Iranian-made Shahed UAV purportedly used in a failed attack on the Redeployment Co-ordination Committee delegation. (Joint Forces Command)

Yemeni Minister of Information Moammar al-Iryani announced on 13 January that Ansar Allah, the Yemeni rebel group popularly known as the Houthis, tried to attack the delegation headed by Major General Sakhir Saghair bin Aziz before it attended a meeting of the Redeployment Co-ordination Committee (RCC) that is facilitating a limited ceasefire agreed in Stockholm in December 2018.

Iryani indicated that the UAV was a ‘kamikaze drone’ rather than one that would have launched weapons, saying, “The Houthi plane, which was manufactured in Iran and loaded with highly explosive materials, was intercepted and detonated prior to its arrival at the residence of the government team.”

In a briefing held in Riyadh on 19 January, Joint Forces Command spokesman Colonel Turki al-Maliki displayed a slide that included a photograph of the UAV used in the “attempt by the Iran-backed Houthi coup militia to target representatives of the legitimate government in the RCC”. The slide named the aircraft as a ‘Shahed’ and stated it has a length of 284 cm and wingspan of 453 cm, but did not describe how it was armed.