VILNIUS (Reuters) – Germany will not deliver Eurofighter combat aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the near future, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Wednesday, after a newspaper quoted a government document as linking any such move to an end of the war in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia leads a coalition that has been battling the Iranian-aligned Houthis in Yemen since 2015. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and left millions hungry.
“There will be no decision on the delivery of Eurofighter jets to Saudi Arabia any time soon,” Scholz told reporters on the second day of a NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.
A government source told Reuters that Germany would decide the issue during this legislative term, which ends in 2025.
Earlier on Wednesday, Germany’s SZ newspaper cited an internal government document as saying that “applications for export licences for Saudi Arabia will be postponed until the end of the war in Yemen”.
Germany halted arms sales to Saudi Arabia following the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018, taking a far tougher approach than major allies such as the United States, France and Britain.
But since the rapprochement of Saudi Arabia and Iran earlier this year, Britain has argued that Germany can no longer block the export of Eurofighter jets to third parties.
Britain’s BAE Systems struck a deal five years ago for the arms maker to supply 48 of the jets in question, but a third of the components for the jets come from Germany.
According to reports earlier this month, Germany’s governing coalition was at odds over whether to cede to British pressure, with the Greens strongly opposed to the move.
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold; writing by Miranda Murray; editing by Rachel More, Friederike Heine and Mark Heinrich)
