Boat car­ry­ing refugees was trav­el­ling to Su­dan when it was hit by airstrike from Apache he­li­copter, coast­guard says

Thirty-one So­mali refugees were killed off the coast of Yemen when a he­li­copter at­tacked the boat they were trav­el­ling in, a coast­guard in the Houthi-con­trolled Hu­day­dah area has said.

Mo­hamed al-Alay said the refugees, car­ry­ing of­fi­cial doc­u­ments, from the UN high com­mis­sioner for refugees, were on their way from Yemen to Su­dan when they were at­tacked late on Thurs­day by an Apache he­li­copter near the Bab el-Man­deb strait.

A sailor who had been op­er­at­ing the boat, Ibrahim Ali Zeyad, said 80 refugees were res­cued af­ter the in­ci­dent.

It was not im­me­di­ately clear who car­ried out the at­tack.

Hu­day­dah is con­trolled by Iran-al­lied Houthi fight­ers who in 2014 over­ran Yemen’s cap­i­tal Sana’a and forced the Saudi-backed gov­ern­ment of Abd-Rabbu Man­sour Hadi to flee into ex­ile.

A Saudi-led coali­tion was formed in 2015 to fight the Houthis and troops loyal to for­mer pres­i­dent Ali Ab­dul­lah Saleh, who have fired mis­siles into neigh­bour­ing Saudi Ara­bia.

The Bab el-Man­deb is a strate­gic wa­ter­way at the foot of the Red Sea through which nearly 4 mil­lion bar­rels of oil are shipped daily to Eu­rope, the United States and Asia.