At least 12 people were killed and 309 injured in an attack on King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh on Saturday, according to Saudi authorities. It is the deadliest attack in the kingdom since May 2015, and operations at the airport have been suspended.
The Saudi civil aviation authority said the dead included four Saudis, two people from Bangladesh, and one each from the United States, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Sudan and Egypt. Some of the injured were in “critical condition”, it said, and damage to the airport was still being assessed. An eyewitness told Reuters that more than a dozen ambulances raced to the site.
Houthis blamed
A Saudi-led military coalition blamed Yemen’s Houthis and vowed to respond. Its spokesman, Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, said a passenger terminal was hit and that civilian passengers and airport staff were among the casualties. He called it a “full-fledged war crime”. Another witness told Reuters he saw injured people fleeing gate 401 after it was struck.
The Houthis had not commented on Saturday’s attack. They did say they were behind strikes on the same airport on Thursday that killed three people and damaged a plane. Three more people died in separate Houthi attacks on two other Saudi airports on 6 and 7 October. The coalition also said a projectile fell near King Fahd International Airport in Dammam on Saturday.
Reaction
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply shocked” and called the attacks a “violation of international law” that “must cease immediately”. Kuwait described the strikes as “heinous and cowardly”, and Egypt, Palestine and Qatar also condemned them. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the attacks and confirmed an American citizen had died. President Donald Trump indicated he might join the Saudis in strikes on the Iran-backed group. “We just found out about the recent attack, so we’ll make a decision. We move very quickly,” he told reporters.
Western embassies told citizens to keep away from the Riyadh airport. The UK Foreign Office said British nationals should avoid the area until it is secure, and the US embassy told staff they need “special authorisation” to use the airports in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Several Gulf airlines cancelled flights, with Kuwait Airways citing the “security situation”. For the second time in under a month, Riyadh schools moved to remote learning for the week.
A truce coming apart
The Houthis say they are targeting Saudi Arabia for backing government forces in Yemen’s civil war. A temporary ceasefire was brokered in 2022, after years of fighting that killed hundreds of thousands of people, but the informal truce began to unravel in July. The Houthis then announced a “maritime embargo” against Saudi Arabia and began missile and drone attacks on Saudi airports, oil facilities and tankers in the Red Sea. They cited a years-long Saudi blockade and an air strike on the airport in Sanaa, the Houthi-held capital.
Fighting has escalated recently between the Saudi-backed government and the Houthis, who are backed by Iran and control most of Yemen. They have also seized stretches of the Red Sea coast, including the port of Mokha on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a chokepoint for global shipping. Pro-government forces say they have since secured the strait.
