The Saudi school bus bombing in Yemen reportedly used an American-made weapon

Saudi school bus bombing in Yemen used U.S.-made weapon, CNN reports.

last updated 20 August 2018

The weapon used in the Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a school bus in Yemen earlier this month that killed 51 people, 40 of them children, and wounded 79 more was manufactured in the United States, CNN reported Friday night.

The bomb in question was reportedly a 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb produced by Lockheed Martin, an American defense contractor. It was identified from numbers on the shrapnel.

The Saudi coalition, which has been credibly accused of war crimes in Yemen, is supported and enabled by the United States. The coalition promised to investigate itself for this attack.

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A coalition representative declined to comment on the airstrike while the self-investigation is underway, and a Pentagon representative would not confirm the bomb's origin, instead providing CNN a generic condemnation of civilian casualties.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.