Saudi officer killed in cross-border fire from Yemen

A Saudi army general has been killed in cross-border fire from Yemen, the armed forces announced Sunday, making him the highest-ranking officer to be killed in border attacks since March.

Major General Abdulrahman bin Saad al-Shahrani, commander of the 18th Brigade, was inspecting troops deployed “on the front lines along the southern region when the post came under random enemy fire,” said the military said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

Shahrani was wounded in the attack and hospitalized, it said.

The statement did not say when the attack occurred but added that Shahrani had died of his injuries on Sunday.

Earlier, the SPA reported that a Saudi border guard had been killed on Saturday by a rocket fired from Yemeni anti-government rebels that hit a border post in the kingdom’s Hazan region.

More than 50 people, most of them troops, have been killed along the Saudi-Yemen border since the Riyadh-led military coalition began air strikes on Iran-backed militias across the kingdom’s impoverished neighbor in March.