The death toll from a Houthi missile strike on a Yemeni government training camp has risen to 73, Al Jazeera reported on Tuesday, after local authorities revised an earlier count.
The attack hit the al-Alam camp in Shabwa province, southern Yemen, on Monday. Hiru News reported at 10.50 a.m. Colombo time, citing Reuters and the provincial governor, that 58 people had been killed and more than 200 injured, with a further 14 missing.
The two figures are the same event at different hours. Hiru’s 58 was the governor’s count on Tuesday morning; Al Jazeera’s 73 is the revision issued later the same day. A reader seeing only one filing gets a toll that has since moved.
Britain deploys fighters to Saudi Arabia
Hours later, Hiru reported at 6.17 p.m. that Britain’s Defence Secretary said RAF Typhoon fighters will be deployed to defend Saudi Arabia against intensifying Houthi missile and drone attacks.
The British Ministry of Defence, issuing a statement, said the aircraft would fly “defensive counter-air operations” to protect Saudi cities and key infrastructure. Al Jazeera’s Tuesday report separately records a Houthi ballistic missile fired towards Riyadh.
The strategic limits of outside involvement are narrow. Ali al-Dahab, a military and security strategic affairs expert, told Al Jazeera that “the probability of international ground forces engaging to confront the Houthis seems slim; expected participation will be limited to air and naval support.”
Elsewhere in Yemen, UN human rights chief Volker Turk said the Houthis’ closure of the only supply route linking Taiz to Aden “is placing civilians at grave risk, blocking humanitarian aid and cutting off essential supplies.”
Why this reaches Sri Lanka
This is not a distant conflict for Sri Lankan readers, and this desk has tracked its approach for three weeks.
Houthi strikes on Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport on 10 and 11 October were reported by this desk at the time (airport attack; Houthi warning on Saudi airspace). SriLankan Airlines has since suspended its Riyadh and Dammam services from 24 October — a route used heavily by Sri Lankan migrant workers in the kingdom. Oil reached $110 a barrel on 17 October, its highest since May, on the same escalation.
A British combat air deployment to protect Saudi cities is a further step in that sequence, and bears directly on when those flights resume.
Not reported
Neither Hiru filing gives the number of missiles fired, the ages of those killed, or a Houthi statement. Neither source read by this desk states how many Typhoons are being deployed, from where, for how long, or under what rules of engagement, and the British Defence Secretary is not named in Hiru’s account. No filing reports any Sri Lankan government statement on the deployment, or any revised date for the suspended flights.
Sources: Al Jazeera, Hiru News — Shabwa attack (Sinhala), Hiru News — RAF deployment (Sinhala).
