RIYADH, 20 May 2004 — One Saudi and 10 Yemeni nationals were injured when a helicopter belonging to a German company demarcating the border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen crashed, a newspaper reported yesterday.
The accident, which occurred Tuesday in a mountainous area of Jizan in the south of the Kingdom, was due to a technical failure, Okaz said. It did not give further details, saying only that the 11 people injured in the crash were hospitalized.
The German company involved in demarcating the frontier is Hansa Luftbild, which signed a $986-million contract with Riyadh and Sanaa three years ago after the two neighbors signed an agreement in June 2000 that ended a decades-old border dispute.
The company could not be reached for comment. A German Embassy official in Riyadh said the mission “has no indication that any German national is involved in this incident.”
