Two Saudi-Led Coalition Spy Drones Downed in Yemen
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used by a Saudi-led coalition for espionage activities have been downed in Yemen, military sources in the Arabian Peninsula country said.
The sources said the two intruding spy drones were shot down by the Yemeni army’s air defense forces on Sunday, the Arabic language al-Masirah news network reported.
They said the first drone was targeted by the air defense forces in al-Aqaba area in Jawf province while the second one came down in al-Fariza military base in Jizan province.
It came two days after al-Masirah reported that a Jordanian F-16 warplane had been shot down by the ‘anti-aircraft defenses’ of Yemen.
Saudi media, meanwhile, claimed that the fighter jet crashed due to ‘technical reasons’.
Yemeni army and forces of the Houthi Ansarallah movement have downed the invading aircraft of the coalition times and again but they are mostly depicted by the media as accidental ‘crashes’.
In March last year, two Emirati pilots were killed when their Mirage warplane crashed in Yemen because of what the coalition called a ‘technical fault’.
Three months earlier, a Bahraini pilot survived when his F-16 crashed in Saudi Arabia, reportedly also for technical reasons.
A Moroccan air force pilot died in May 2015 when his F-16 went down in Yemen, with the coalition blaming human error or a technical fault.
Two Saudi F-15 pilots were rescued when they ejected from their jet off Yemen's coast shortly after coalition air strikes began.
Rights groups have repeatedly criticized the coalition bombing campaign, which has been going on for almost two years, over high civilian casualties.