UK Has Blood of Innocent Yemenis on Its Hands: Iran’s Mousavi

By Staff, Agencies

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi said Britain’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia has made the UK an accomplice to Riyadh’s war crimes in Yemen.

“As the atrocities of the aggression push #Yemen on the brink of the worst humanitarian crisis, coupled w/ COVID19, the British Gvt. has profited from the arms export to the KSA & left the blood of innocent Yemenis on its hands. The UK must stand on the right side of history,” Mousavi tweeted on Friday.

In a recent report, Yemen’s Legal Center for Rights and Development, an independent monitoring group, put the civilian death toll in the war-torn Arab country since 2015 at 16,075.

In 2017, Andrew Smith of the UK-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade [CAAT] said weapons sold to the Saudi regime have been used for killing civilians in Yemen.

“The scale of the destruction that has been inflicted upon Yemen is appalling,” said Smith.

Smith said supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia was unlawful and the UK government, which was selling arms to Riyadh, was complicit in this illegal act.

The Saudi-led bombing campaign has created all sorts of shortages, triggering a variety of issues across Yemen, including water, food and medicine shortage, as well as a deadly cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 22-hundred people and is suspected to have infected more than 840,000 others.

CAAT accuses the British government of complicity with the Saudis in the atrocities against Yemeni people.