The Saudi-led coalition fighting a war against Houthi rebels in Yemen said it will investigate an airstrike that killed two children last week after CNN provided evidence of the incident.
Coalition spokesman Turki al-Malki told CNN in a statement that it will refer the bombing in the northern province of Saada on September 13 to the Joint Incident Assessment Team (JIAT) due to the “probability of collateral damage and civilian casualties during the targeting of a gathering of Houthi militias.”
On Tuesday CNN aired a report showing that an airstrike which hit a displaced Yemeni family’s home killed two young siblings – a three-month-old baby girl named Somood Hasan Shoay Al-Dahery and three-year-old boy Nabil Hasan Shoay Al-Dahery – in Saada last week.
The footage captures the sound of the plane, the smoke rising from the strike, and the sight of the family’s neighbors digging the bodies of the two children out from under the rubble.
The family had fled from Wadi Layya village in Al-Daher district on the border with Saudi Arabia into Haidan district in Saada governorate where the airstrike happened.
CNN’s report also revealed that fragments of US-manufactured weapons had been found at the sites of a string of other attacks since the start of the war, though it was unclear who manufactured the bombs used in the September 13 strike.
Last month, a separate CNN investigation found remnants of a US-made bomb at the scene of an August airstrike in Saada that left dozens of schoolboys dead.
Cdr. Rebecca Rebarich, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, told CNN that “the final decisions on the conduct of operations in the campaign are made by the members of the Saudi-led coalition, not the United States.”
The Saudi-led coalition said all documents relating to the September 13 incident have been referred to the JIAT which will later reveal the results of its investigation.
Salma Abdelaziz and Sarah El Sirgany in Abu Dhabi contributed to this report