US main culprit behind assassination of Yemen’s Political Council chief: Cmdr.

A high-ranking Yemeni military official has held the United States responsible for the recent assassination of the country’s Head of the Supreme Political Council, Saleh al-Samad, in the western coastal province of Hudaydah, stating that Saudi Arabia is not capable of carrying out such a complex operation.

“Saudi Arabia’s capabilities are limited. Americans planned and then executed this intricate operation,” Arabic-language al-Masirah television network quoted Yemen's Air Force and Air Defense commander Major General, Ibrahim al-Shami, as saying on Friday.

He further noted that a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired a missile into Samad’s residence in the Red Sea port city of Hudaydah, located 150 kilometers southwest of the capital Sana'a, on April 19.

Secretary General of the National Democratic Front, Ali Faisal, also stated that the murder of the senior member of the Houthi Ansarullah movement bears strong similarity to those being carried out by Israeli agents against Palestinian resistance figures.

Addressing his supporters via a televised speech on Monday, Leader of Yemen's Houthi Ansarullah movement Abdul-Malik Badreddin al-Houthi said all aggressor countries, including the US and Saudi Arabia, were responsible for the killing of Samad, and they must await the consequences of their crime.

He also stressed that such crimes against the Yemeni nation would not break the will of his people in defending their country against the so-called military coalition.    

Houthi noted that the top figure had been killed, along with six of his companions, after their convoy was hit by three Saudi airstrikes in al-Khamsin Street of Hudaydah.  

He called on the Yemeni people to participate in a massive demonstration, urged by Samad days prior his demise, against the Saudi-led war.

The Yemeni Ministry of Human Rights announced in a statement on March 25 that the Saudi-led war had left 600,000 civilians dead and injured since March 2015.

The United Nations says a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.

A high-ranking UN aid official recently warned against the “catastrophic” living conditions in Yemen, stating that there was a growing risk of famine and cholera there.

“After three years of conflict, conditions in Yemen are catastrophic,” John Ging, UN director of aid operations, told the UN Security Council on February 27.

He added, “People's lives have continued unraveling. Conflict has escalated since November driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes.”

Ging said cholera had infected 1.1 million people in Yemen since last April, and a new outbreak of diphtheria had occurred in the war-ravaged Arab country since 1982.

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