Houses destroyed by a Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen, Tuesday, Sept 8, 2015. (Source: AP) Houses destroyed by a Saudi-led airstrike in Yemen, Tuesday, Sept 8, 2015. (Source: AP)

A Saudi-led alliance killed at least 20 Indian nationals in airstrikes on fuel smugglers at a Yemeni port Tuesday, fishermen said.

Local residents and fishermen said planes from the Saudi-led alliance struck two boats at al-Khokha — a small port near Hodeidah in western Yemen used by Indians to smuggle badly needed fuel supplies into the country — killing 20 of them.

Officials were not immediately available to comment on the report.

The Ministry of External Affairs, too, said it has no information about the reports. “We are ascertaining the facts about the reports,” MEA spokesman Vikas Swarup said.

The Indian Embassy in Yemen was shut down in April after evacuation of its nationals.

ENS adds: Congress president Sonia Gandhi expressed shock at the killing of Indians. Condemning the attack, she said she hoped the Indian government was taking adequate measures to ensure immediate relief, and would do the needful in evacuating Indians from the strife zone.

The Saudi-led alliance, made up mainly of Gulf Arab countries, has increased airstrikes on Yemen’s capital Sanaa and other parts of the country since Friday, when a Houthi missile attack killed at least 60 Saudi, Bahraini and United Arab Emirates soldiers at a military camp east of Sanaa.

They were part of a force preparing to assault the capital, which the Iranian-allied Houthis seized last September.

Friday’s attack was the deadliest yet for Gulf soldiers in the war and may herald a turning point as Saudi-allied countries appear to be committing to a ground war they had so far avoided.

Qatari-owned Al Jazeera TV reported that the number of forces deployed by the alliance had risen to 10,000.

The Yemeni government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi fled to Riyadh in March as Houthi forces closed in on their last redoubt in Aden, triggering the Saudi-led intervention and fighting which has killed more than 4,500 people, many of them civilians.

Loyalist Yemeni forces and Gulf soldiers took back Aden and most of Yemen’s south in July but battlelines have barely moved since as the allied forces face stiff resistance in the Houthis’ northern redoubts.

The Saudi-led alliance sees the campaign as a fight against creeping Iranian influence but the Houthis deny being beholden to Tehran and say the exiled government in Riyadh and the coalition are US puppets. They say they deposed a corrupt government.

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