CAIRO — Two air force pilots from the United Arab Emirates were killed on Monday when their warplane crashed while fighting over Yemen, according to Saudi Arabia’s official news agency.

The news agency blamed a “technical malfunction” for the crash, but the claim was impossible to verify independently. Local media reported that the plane, a French Mirage, had crashed in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden, and showed pictures of the wreckage.

Saudi Arabia announced the deaths in its capacity as the leader of a coalition of Arab states that has been fighting a rebel group in Yemen known as the Houthis for almost a year.

The crash was at least the third crash or downing of a coalition fighter jet in the conflict. And it was the latest setback for the United Arab Emirates, one of the coalition’s most visible and active participants, which has lost scores of soldiers in Houthi rocket strikes or militant attacks.

The crash also came amid growing international concern about the broader consequences of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has received military support from the United States. More than 6,000 people, nearly half of them civilians, have been killed in a conflict that has shown no sign of abating and has resulted in what aid workers say is one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Sunni Muslim extremist groups, including Al Qaeda’s powerful local affiliate and a branch of the Islamic State, have gained strength while fighting alongside Saudi-backed forces against the Houthis. The militant groups have capitalized on the war to gain territory in southern Yemen.

For most of the conflict, the coalition appeared to ignore the expanding reach of the Sunni militants while it focused its firepower on territory controlled by the Houthis, a Shiite-led group whom the Saudis regard as a proxy force for Shiite Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival. In recent days, though, the coalition for the first time has been forced to bomb territory that it had claimed to control, in Aden, to counter the growing presence of Al Qaeda militants there.