Yemen’s Salvation Government has strongly condemned the execution of ten prisoners by Saudi-sponsored Takfiri militants in the western coastal city of Hudaydah, describing it as a "war crime" and a blatant violation of international humanitarian law.
The Yemeni Foreign Ministry, in a statement, condemned the executions and said they are in flagrant breach of international principles, particularly the 1949 Third Geneva Convention, which forbids exposing prisoners to any form of assault or torture, and requires them to be treated humanely.
The statement highlighted that the Saudi-led military coalition and its Takfiri mercenaries have perpetrated a wide range of heinous crimes against imprisoned Yemeni army troops and fighters from Popular Committees, including execution, torture, assaults, mutilation, detention in secret prisons and under unhygienic conditions, and deliberate medical negligence.
The Yemeni parliament, for its part, decried the international community’s silence in the face of the brutal executions.
The legislature said the killings exposed the true nature of the Saudi-led alliance and its allied terrorists, calling on the United Nations, the UN Security Council, and all relevant international bodies to force the Saudi-led war coalition into handing over the bodies of the fallen Yemeni fighters.
The parliament also asked the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and human rights organizations across the globe to break their “shameful” silence and condemn the outrageous crime against humanity.
Additionally, the political bureau of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement denounced the killing of the prisoners as a crime against humanity that only heartless serial killers would commit.
“Mercenaries of the Saudi-led coalition of aggression have the blood of ten jailed army troops and Popular Committees fighters on their hands. The crime is one of the most heinous of its kind,” it stated.
Ansarullah warned that the executions would set a dangerous precedent, emphasizing that the Riyadh regime and its allies know no limits for their horrendous and brutal crimes.
According to Abdulqader al-Mortadha, head of the Committee for Prisoners’ Affairs in the Yemeni National Salvation Government, Saudi mercenaries executed the victims on Saturday and dismembered their bodies.
Five of the prisoners were residents of Yemen’s Hudaydah province, while the rest were respectively from the provinces of Hajjah and Mahwit.
Saudi Arabia, backed by the US and regional allies, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of Yemen’s former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the Ansarullah movement.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead, and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there.
Despite heavily-armed Saudi Arabia’s continuous bombardment of the impoverished country, Yemeni armed forces and the Popular Committees have grown steadily in strength against the Saudi-led invaders and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.