Houthi drone attack sets plane ablaze at Saudi airport
AFP, RIYADH
A drone strike launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis on Wednesday left a civilian plane ablaze at a Saudi airport, drawing warnings from the US days after it moved to delist the rebels as terrorists.
Saudi authorities did not immediately report any casualties from the attack, claimed by the Houthis, the latest in a series of rebel assaults on the kingdom, despite a renewed US push to de-escalate Yemen’s six-year conflict.
Pictures released by state media showed a blackened gash on the side of a passenger jet after the attack, which occurred on the same day the new US special envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking met Saudi Arabian Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Faisal bin Farhan in Riyadh for talks.
She was sentenced to five years and eight months in prison on terrorism-related charges.
France and Germany called for her quick release.
The family of prominent human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul will appeal her prison sentence but expressed little hope in the Saudi judicial system, calling the trial a sham and politically motivated .
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On Monday, a Saudi court sentenced al-Hathloul to five years and eight months in prison on terrorism-related charges and banned her from leaving the country for five years, sparking a torrent of international criticism.
Al-Hathloul, 31, was arrested in May 2018 with about a dozen other women s rights activists just weeks before the historic lifting of a decades-long ban on female drivers, a reform for which they had long campaigned.