SANAA (AFP) – Hundreds of Yemeni students demonstrated on Sunday outside the Sanaa university campus on the eighth straight day of anti-regime protests in the capital, an AFP correspondent reported.

Protesters chanted slogans demanding the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power for 32 years, the correspondent said.
Around 100 of Saleh's supporters held a pro-government protest across the street from the campus while police set up a cordon to separate the two groups.

Pro- and anti-Saleh demonstrators have clashed violently over the past week in Sanaa with guns, batons and rocks with anti-regime protesters calling on the president to quit.
On Saturday, the police did not intervene as fierce clashes left five students wounded, according to an AFP correspondent.

Yemeni journalists were not spared the violence and on Saturday dozens of them issued a statement accusing Yemen's General People's Congress ruling party of plotting attacks on those covering anti-regime protests in Sanaa.
"These attacks are organised and the ruling party is behind them," the journalists said in a statement after gathering at the journalists' union offices.

Saleh ordered security services late Saturday to "provide the needed protection for journalists to help them carry out their job," the state news agency Saba reported.

Journalists must be able "to serve the truth and give the right information," Saba quoted the president as saying.
Dozens of journalists, including AFP correspondents, have been beaten while doing their job during the past week.
On Monday, BBC journalist Abdullah Ghorab and his cameraman Mohammed Omran were deliberately attacked by government supporters while reporting on violent protests against Saleh near Sanaa University, the broadcaster said.

Protests, which have become increasingly violent in poverty-striken Yemen despite calls by Saleh -- who was elected to a seven-year-term in September 2006 -- urging dialogue to form a government of national unity.
Anti-government demonstrations have also taken place in the southern regional capital Aden and several people have been killed by police there.

On Sunday the police arrested the main southern opposition leader, Hassan Baoum, shortly after he arrived in Aden to take part in an anti-government protest, his son said.

Baoum was arrested along with his son Fawaz at the Naqib hospital after he had undergone some medical tests, another son said.

He said that Baoum arrived in the port city from nearby Lahij earlier in the day with the intention of joining the protest.
Police have killed 10 people in Aden in the past week, according to an AFP tally, as they resorted to gunfire to disperse frequent protests against the government.

Baoum had only come out of custody earlier this year after a previous arrest on November 9.
Baoum heads the supreme council of the Southern Movement, the main organiser of protests in the south in recent months. The movement's members want either secession or increased autonomy for the formerly independent region.

Residents complain of discrimination by the Sanaa government in the distribution of resources since union between north and south in 1990.
The south broke away again in 1994, sparking a brief civil war that ended with the region overrun by northern troops.