Saudi air defences destroyed three cruise missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthis towards the Riyadh region on Wednesday, the Saudi-led coalition said — the second consecutive day of interceptions over the Saudi capital.
The coalition, which backs Yemen’s internationally recognised government, said all three missiles were brought down in the air before reaching their intended targets, Hiru News reported.
Where this sits in the sequence
Wednesday’s interception is the latest in an intensifying run of attacks on the Saudi capital. On Tuesday the coalition said it brought down a ballistic missile and a cruise missile aimed at Riyadh.
It follows Sunday’s larger exchange, when the coalition reported destroying three ballistic and two cruise missiles, and the Houthis claimed six operations against Saudi oil facilities, Riyadh airport and military positions. A Houthi strike that day damaged an Aramco administrative building in Riyadh’s financial district.
The two events are distinct: Sunday’s was a mixed ballistic-and-cruise salvo with claimed impacts, Wednesday’s an all-cruise-missile launch that the coalition says was fully intercepted.
Not reported
The Hiru filing does not date the launch beyond the day of publication, name a coalition spokesperson, specify where the missiles were fired from or intercepted, or report any casualties or damage. It carries no Houthi comment or claim of responsibility, and no Saudi civil-aviation or civil-defence response.
A note on sourcing. This is a single-source report. The interception was carried on Wednesday by a number of regional and wire outlets — including reports that the coalition also intercepted drones directed at the Mecca region, a claim the Houthis have repeatedly denied making — but none of those carriers is in this desk’s verified-domain set, and no verified newsroom we could reach had filed an independent account at the time of writing. Searches of Al Jazeera returned only earlier interception reports from September and October, which concern different launches and are not cited here. Readers should treat the figures above as the coalition’s own account, relayed by one outlet.
