Bomb fragments found in Yemen tie US weapons to string of civilian deaths over course of bloody civil war

Saudi-led coalition planes drop three cluster bombs on the home of 28-year-old farmer Majed Ali in Bani Haddad Village, Haradh District, Hajjah Governorate, according to Mwatana. Six children and three women are among the dead, and six other civilians are injured, the group says.

Mwatana researchers found the outer shell of a CBU-58A/B — a 430-kilogram US-made cluster bomb. CNN determined that the NSN on the remnant linked the munition to an aircraft dispenser and bomb manufactured in 1977 by the Air Armament Center, a division of the US government’s Air Force Materiel Command. The center, which closed in 2012, was once responsible for the development, acquisition, testing, and deployment of all air-delivered weapons for the US Air Force. Weapons experts told Mwatana there are usually about 630 BLU-63 spherical bomblets inside the type of shell found. According to Human Rights Watch, the United States exported 1,000 cluster bombs of this type to Saudi Arabia between 1970 and 1995. The United States is one of seven nations — including China, Israel, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia — that have rejected a ban on the sale or use of cluster bombs.

CBU-58A/B