10 Rials Qadhi Azzubairi Memorial, Mule

This piece is a mule — a coin struck from dies that were never intended to be paired together. The Qadhi Azzubairi commemorative series honored Muhammad Mahmoud al-Zubairi, the Yemeni poet and nationalist killed in 1965, whose death remains disputed; official accounts blamed royalist tribesmen, though many contemporaries suspected a political assassination. The mule pairing occurred during a period of acute institutional instability in the Yemen Arab Republic, when the young republic was still prosecuting its civil war against royalist forces backed by Saudi Arabia, with Egyptian troops propping up the republican side.

Production oversight was minimal under those conditions, which explains how mismatched dies reached the press at all.