SAUDI ARABIAN border guards have killed “possibly thousands” of unarmed refugees in recent years, a leading rights group said in a new report today.

Human Rights Watch reports eyewitnesses telling of troops launching machine-gun and mortar attacks on migrants from Ethiopia trying to cross into the kingdom from war-torn Yemen with a shocking death toll, according to the report.

The United Nations has already questioned Saudi Arabia about its troops opening fire on the refugees in an escalating pattern of attacks along its southern border with Yemen, where the Saudis have been engaged in a conflict with Houthi insurgents since 2015.

An anonymous Saudi government official called the report “unfounded and not based on reliable sources” but offered no evidence to support the assertion. 

Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who allegedly make tens of thousands of dollars a week smuggling travellers over the border, did not respond to requests for comment.

About 750,000 Ethiopians live in Saudi Arabia. The International Organisation for Migration suggests that as many as 450,000 could have entered the kingdom without authorisation, largely fleeing the two-year civil war in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, which has displaced tens of thousands of people.

Human Rights Watch said it spoke to 38 Ethiopian refugees and four relatives of people who attempted to cross the border between March 2022 and June 2023 who said they saw Saudi guards shoot at travellers or launch explosives at groups.

The report said the evidence gathered from the eyewitnesses, videos, photos and satellite imagery showed “dead and wounded migrants on the trails, in camps and in medical facilities, how burial sites near the migrant camps grew in size, the expanding Saudi Arabian border security infrastructure and the routes currently used by the migrants to attempt border crossings.”