One person has been killed and eight injured in an attack on King Fahd International Airport in the Saudi city of Dammam, the kingdom’s civil aviation authority has said.
The authority announced the casualties in a statement posted to its account on X, adding that the attack also caused property damage to the airport and that damage assessments are under way, Hiru News reported at 5.59 a.m. Colombo time on Thursday, citing Al Jazeera.
No further details about the attack have been disclosed. Neither the authority’s statement as reported nor the filing attributes responsibility to anyone, and the type of munition is not described.
The second strike on this airport, and the first death there
Dammam’s airport has been hit before in the current series. On 12 October this desk recorded that Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree claimed a strike on King Fahd International Airport alongside two Saudi Aramco facilities, and that the Saudi civil aviation authority confirmed the Dammam strike late that Sunday. An eyewitness aboard a taxiing aircraft described a projectile striking the tarmac beside parked aircraft at about 8.30 p.m. local time and starting a fire.
That strike produced no reported deaths at Dammam. This one has produced a fatality and eight injuries — making it, on this desk’s record, the deadliest attack on the Dammam airport so far in a campaign that has until now been deadliest in Riyadh.
One caution about the wording. The authority’s new statement says damage assessments are under way — close to what it said on 12 October (“damage assessments and safety inspections of airport facilities are under way”). The repetition is the authority’s standard formula for an airport strike, and should not be read as a fresh detail.
Why Dammam matters to Sri Lanka, and why the timing does
Dammam is the kingdom’s third-largest airport and serves the Eastern Province, which hosts a large share of the Sri Lankan workforce in Saudi Arabia.
The timing is the sharpest point. SriLankan Airlines extended its suspension of Colombo–Riyadh and Colombo–Dammam flights to 24 October, pushing the resumption date back for the second time and citing the regional security situation. That date is two days away, and this attack struck one of the two airports the carrier is due to resume flying into.
The airline has not commented on the attack, and nothing in either filing indicates whether the 24 October date will hold.
Dammam is also where Anojan Sivarasa is held — the Sri Lankan migrant worker moved to a new cell at Dammam Prison this month, whose appeal against a death sentence is before the Saudi Supreme Court.
Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Employment and Tourism condemned the earlier attacks on Saudi civilian airports on 10 October, extending condolences and urging all parties to show maximum restraint, without naming who carried them out.
Washington ordered staff out hours earlier
On Wednesday — hours before this attack was reported — the US State Department ordered the departure of non-emergency government employees and their family members from its mission in Saudi Arabia, Al Jazeera reported.
The order cited escalating Houthi attacks, with the department noting that “Iranian-supported Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure resulting in civilian casualties.”
That filing is about the departure order, not about this attack, and it does not mention a strike on Dammam on 21 or 22 October. It is cited here for the same-day US decision, which is the clearest available measure of how Washington was reading the risk in the hours before the airport was hit.
Not reported
Neither filing says what struck the airport, who fired it, what time it hit, whether the airport is open or closed, or whether flights have been cancelled. The nationality of the person killed is not given — relevant in a province with a large Sri Lankan workforce, and not answerable from these filings. No Sri Lankan newsroom other than Hiru had carried the attack at the time of writing, and Ada Derana’s site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for more than a month.
An early search summary seen while reporting this story stated that both King Khalid and King Fahd airports “remain closed.” The Al Jazeera article it was drawn from does not say that, and the claim is not made here.
