GLENROTHES based US weapons manufacturer Raytheon are reportedly one of the makers of a bomb used by the Saudi-led coalition in a devastating attack on a school bus that killed 40 children in Yemen earlier this month.

It’s understood the 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb was sold to Saudi Arabia as part of a US State Department-sanctioned deal.

Research by CNN, and local Yemeni journalists and munitions experts, linked the bomb used on the the attack in Yemen’s Houthi rebel-held north market on August 9 to aerospace company Lockheed Martin.

Jane’s Defence Weekly said remnants of a Raytheon guidance kit appear to have been found close to the scene of the attack.

Reports in yesterday’s Sunday Mail suggested Raytheon had, in recent years, been awarded substantial grants and support from Scottish ministers and government agencies.

One Green MSP accused the SNP of “stomach churning” hypocrisy for attacking the UK government for licensing arms sales, while at the same time pandering to the firm.

Out of the 16,000-plus raids the coalition launched on the rebels since the start of the conflict, nearly a third of all bombs have hit civilian targets.

Last year, the UN blacklisted the Saudi-UAE alliance.

That, however, has made little difference to the US and UK governments.

The bomb’s impact as it landed on the bus full of excited schoolchildren on a day trip was devastating.

Houthi Health Minister Taha al-Mutawakil said last week of the 51 people who died in the airstrike, 40 were children. He added that of the 79 people wounded, 56 were children.

Eight-year-old Mokhtar al-Jaradi’s was one of the survivors. He and his classmates had been on a day-long field trip organised by a pro-Houthi Islamic seminary.

“I saw the explosion, then my ears started ringing,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I saw blood, then smoke. And once I saw my friends dying, I began crying.”

Large protests erupted in the capital, Sanaa, and elsewhere. Local newspapers called the attack one of the worst days in Yemen’s three-year war.

Three days after the attack, victims’ families continued to throng to the scene of the attack, hoping to find the remains of their loved ones “I didn’t find any of him,” said Abdelhakim Amir told the news agency. “Not his finger, not his bone, not his skull, nothing.”

Saudi Arabia, which, along with the United Arab Emirates, has been bombing Yemen since March 2015, said it would carry out an investigation.

On the day of the bus attack, Colonel Turki al-Malki, a spokesperson for the alliance, defended the raid, saying his forces hit a “legitimate military target”, which included “operators and planners”.

Raytheon have received £135,465 from Scottish Enterprise between 2014 and 2017.

The government say this money is to help the company diversify away from the manufacture of arms. Ross Greer MSP, external affairs spokesman for the Scottish Greens, said: “The hypocrisy is just stomach churning, when an SNP Government hand public cash to arms manufacturers whose weapons systems are then used to commit war crimes against children in Yemen before giving more public cash to the Yemen Crisis Appeal.

“No donation to charity will wash the blood off their hands,” he added.

The Scottish Government insisted that neither they or their enterprise agencies provided “funding for the manufacture of munitions”.

A spokesman said: “The support provided is focused on helping firms to diversify and develop non-military applications for their technology and ensure Scotland continues to benefit from the thousands of jobs in the defence, aerospace and shipbuilding sectors.

“We are very clear that we expect the UK Government to properly police the export of arms and investigate whenever concerns are raised.

“However, while defence is reserved to the UK Government, it remains important to have appropriate defence and security capabilities maintained in Scotland.”

Raytheon previously declined to comment on the allegations.