Amnesty Condemns US, UK over Yemen Arms

The rights group said the two countries had together sent more than five billion dollars (4.6 billion euros) worth of arms to Riyadh since a Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015.

That was more than 10 times their humanitarian aid to Yemen during the same period, it said.

The London-based watchdog described the alleged arms transfers as a "shameful contradiction" of aid efforts by the United States and Britain.

"These governments have continued to authorize such arms transfers at the same time as providing aid to alleviate the very crisis they have helped to create," said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty's deputy director of research for the Middle East and North Africa, AFP reported.

"Yemeni civilians continue to pay the price of these brazenly hypocritical arms supplies."

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been launching deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to the fugitive former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

At least 11,000 Yemenis, including women and children, have lost their lives in the deadly military campaign.

Earlier this month, Amnesty accused the Saudi-led coalition of using banned cluster munitions in raids on residential areas.

Amnesty said the bombs, made in Brazil, had been used in multiple attacks since October 2015, most recently last month in the Houthi-controlled northern Saada region.

In December the coalition admitted it had made "limited use" of British-made cluster bombs. It maintains it does not deliberately target civilians.