Saudi border guards blamed for mass killing of migrants along Yemen border in new Human Rights Watch report., according to a BBC report.

The report says hundreds of people, many of them Ethiopians crossing war-torn Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia, have been killed by gunfire.

Saudi Arabia has previously rejected allegations of systematic killings.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report contains testimonies from migrants who say that the Saudi Arabian police shot at them and threatened them with explosives on Yemen’s rugged northern border with Saudi Arabia.

What we have documented is essentially mass murder,” the head of the investigation, Nadia Hardman, told the BBC.

The report, which covers the period from March 2022 to June this year, details 28 separate incidents involving explosive weapons and 14 shootings at close range.

“I cover border violence, but I’ve never seen anything of this nature, the use of explosives, including against women and children,” Hardman said.

Reports of mass killings by Saudi security forces along the northern border have emerged for the first time last October in a letter from UN experts to the government in Riyadh.

According to the head of the investigation “what appears to be a systematic pattern of large-scale, indiscriminate cross-border killings using artillery shelling and small arms fire by Saudi security forces against migrants.”