By Ahmad Shihadah
Impunity Watch Reporter, Middle East
ADEN, Yemen – About 40 southern separatists escaped from a prison in Yemen after a guard lobbed a hand grenade to disperse an inmates’ protest at the facility, officials said Thursday.
The men escaped amid a melee that erupted when the grenade exploded in the prison in the southern town of Dali, the officials said. Authorities immediately imposed a curfew on the town and launched a manhunt to track down the escaped inmates.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the media, said four prisoners were wounded in the blast. The inmates were protesting their detention without trial.
Southerners in Yemen complain of neglect and discrimination by the north, and an increasingly vocal southern separatist movement has been coming to blows with the central government. The two parts of the country were separate nations before they united in 1990.
Yemen’s interior ministry on Thursday denied the police report that around 30 recently arrested prisoners had made a run for it after a bomb exploded outside a jail in the south of the country. “Information about prisoners fleeing is completely false,” the ministry said in a statement of an earlier police report that sympathizers of a southern secessionist movement had escaped from outside prison.
Also Thursday, police fired tear gas to disperse protesters in Dali and several other southern towns. The demonstrators were protesting the government’s ongoing crackdown against southern pro-secession activists.
Police officials said scores of protesters were detained. Pro-independence protests have multiplied in the south, especially on Thursdays, the start of the Muslim weekend, amid a worsening economic situation in Yemen and charges of discrimination in favor of northerners.
Elsewhere in Yemen’s south, an activist was shot dead and three others were injured when security forces dispersed a protest in the town of Radfan in Lahej province, the local official and media reports said.
Western countries and neighboring Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, fear al Qaeda is exploiting instability in Yemen to launch attacks in the region and beyond.
For more information, please see:
Reuters – Mass Escape From Yemen Jail After Blast – 1 April 2010
AP – 40 Activists Bust Out Of Yemen Prison After Blast – 1 April 2010
AFP – Yemen Denies Prisoners Fled After Bomb Blast – 1 April 2010
BBC – Prisoners Escape From Yemen Jail – 1 April 2010
