FRI 29 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Mar 17, 2011
Source: The Daily Star
One dead, 200 wounded as Yemeni police attack rally

Thursday, March 17, 2011


SANAA: One person was killed and 200 wounded when Yemeni security forces attacked protesters in the Red Sea city of Hudaida with live and rubber bullets, tear gas, clubs and daggers, a doctor who treated victims said.
The impoverished Arabian Peninsula state has been hit by weeks of protests against the 32-year rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.


A doctor treating protesters in Hudaida said hundreds of security forces and plainclothes police had attacked a sit-in. “We received around 200 wounded, 10 were hit by gunfire and 40 suffered stab wounds. One died from his gunshot wounds after reaching the hospital,” he said.


Demonstrators said they were calling on private hospitals to send ambulances and asked Yemenis to donate blood to help treat the wounded. The city’s main hospital had been filled to capacity, they said.


Shouting over the rising clamor and chanting of protesters who regrouped after the attack, one demonstrator told Reuters by phone that security forces, most in civilian clothes, had surrounded the sit-in but later retreated.
“The thugs have left, the wounded are getting treatment and our sit-in continues,” Abdel-Hafid al-Nihari said.
Two protesters told Reuters some of the wounded demonstrators had been chased down by security forces and then beaten in the hospital, but this could not be verified.


The United States has condemned the bloodshed and backed the right to peaceful protest. It says only dialogue can end the crisis.

As widespread protests continue despite rising violence and Saleh’s promises of reform, Yemen delayed a meeting with a group of Western and Gulf Arab donors, known as “Friends of Yemen,” in Riyadh later this month, state news agency Saba said.


“Yemen proposed delaying the coming meeting to give a chance for more preparation,” Saba said.
In further violence Wednesday, a leading activist in Taiz said plainclothes police targeted and beat women at a rally in the city, 200 kilometers south of capital Sanaa, where tens of thousands have camped out for weeks. At least eleven there were wounded, Bushra al-Maqtari said.


In the northeastern provincial capital of Al-Jawf, three ruling General People’s Congress loyalists were wounded in clashes with opposition supporters on the third straight day of attempts by both sides to gain control of government headquarters there, a local official said.


An activist with the main Islamist opposition Al-Islah (Reform) party was shot dead in a gunfight with pro-regime loyalists in Al-Jawf Tuesday, a security official said.


On Feb. 22, Al-Jawf, a stronghold of the Zaidi rebels, also known as Huthis, joined the anti-Saleh protests.
Protesters, frustrated by rampant corruption and soaring unemployment, have been increasingly strident in their demand that Saleh step down. Some 40 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people live on $2 a day or less and a third face chronic hunger. – Reuters, AFP



 
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