RIYADH: Five Saudi Arabian border guards were killed on Monday in clashes with "enemy elements" who tried to infiltrate the kingdom's border with Yemen, the interior ministry said.
The five were killed in eight hours of fighting when the Saudis confronted "enemy elements of armed groups who tried to infiltrate in several places" in the Najran area, the official SPA news agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying.
It said the frontier guards backed by the country's army thwarted the attempts to cross the border which began at 0300 GMT.
Southern Saudi Arabia, especially border areas with Yemen, have come under sporadic attack since Riyadh took the lead in March 2015 in an Arab military coalition battling Al Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen.
Helicopter crash
On Monday evening, the coalition said two Saudi officers were killed when their Apache helicopter crashed in Yemen because of bad weather.
They said the aircraft went down in Marib province east of the rebel-held capital Sanaa.
The rebels reported shooting down an Apache between Maarib and the southern Saudi region of Jizan, their media said.
Earlier Monday, a rebel spokesman said the rebels had fired a ballistic missile at a military camp in Jizan, causing casualties and material damage.
Yemeni military sources, meanwhile, reported heavy fighting since Thursday on the Yemeni side of the border between loyalist forces and rebels.
