First commercial plane in months lands in Yemen's Aden

A commercial airliner landed Thursday at Aden's international airport, its director said, the first civilian plane to touch down in war-torn southern Yemen in more than four months.

The Yemenia flight from Djibouti carried mainly Yemenis who had fled fierce fighting between pro- and anti-government forces, airport director Tarek Abdo told AFP.

It comes after a Saudi Arabian soldier was killed in shelling on the border with Yemen, the military said late Wednesday, adding to a rising toll in the kingdom's south over the past week.

"He was hit by a projectile in the sector of Jazan," a Saudi border district, said a statement from the Saudi-led coalition which has been bombing rebels in Yemen for more than four months in support of exiled President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

On Sunday, a civilian died when a shell from Yemen hit his house in Najran, another area along the Saudi border.

And last Friday rocket fire from Yemen killed three soldiers and a paramilitary along the frontier, in the deadliest such incident for several weeks.

The cross-border barrages coincide with advances since late July by anti-rebel fighters who recaptured the southern city of Aden from the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

On Tuesday they also took back the al-Anad airbase north of Aden, using heavy armour supplied by the coalition after hundreds of Gulf Arab troops landed in the port city to bolster the fightback by local forces opposed rebel groups.

The Saudi soldier brings the number of people killed in shelling and skirmishes along the Saudi frontier with Yemen to at least 50 since the coalition campaign began on March 26.

Most of the casualties have been soldiers.

In Yemen, the UN says the war has killed nearly 4,000 people, half of them civilians.