It wasn’t the US-made bomb, but rather the Saudi military’s inability to properly use the munition –despite all the American training– that led to the “horror show” bombing of a Yemeni school bus in August, Donald Trump has said.
A Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a school bus, that killed 40 children and maimed dozens of others in the busy market town of Dhahyan in northern Yemen on August 9, is not Washington’s fault, Donald Trump stated in an interview with Axios on Sunday.
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Despite the fact that pieces of a 500-pound (227 kilogram) laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin were found at the site of the explosion, Trump shifted the blame for the tragedy to the coalition’s inability to use the US-supplied weapons properly.
“That was basically people that didn’t know how to use the weapon, which is horrible,” Trump said, calling the widely circulated footage from the bombing a “horror show.”
“I think it’s a terrible situation. I hated seeing what happened with the bus and the children cause that’s pure – that’s a horror show when you see a thing like that, you saw the bus,” he said, stressing that “bother’s not a strong enough” word to describe the disgust he felt watching the tragedy.
When asked by the interviewers if the US should halt selling weapons to their Middle Eastern ally amid continuous reports of an indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing campaign, Trump replied: “We’re looking at Yemen very carefully right now. We are actually studying Yemen very, very carefully.”
“I’ll be talking about a lot of things with the Saudis…but certainly I wouldn’t be having people that don’t know how to use the weapons shooting at buses with children,” Trump added.
READ MORE: Starving Yemeni girl from shocking NYT photo dies as bombing & blockade continues
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