Yemeni army dismisses claim of attacking women's prison in Ta'izz

The Spokesman for the Yemeni Armed Forces, Brigadier General Yahya Saree, has categorically dismissed a claim that the Yemeni army and its allied fighters from the Popular Committees targeted the female section of a prison in Yemen's southwestern province of Ta'izz.

News ID: 449924

Date: 06 April 2020 - 22:48

RNA - On Monday morning, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross said in separate statements that a mortar attack on the female section of a prison in the eponymous provincial capital on Sunday had left six women and a child dead.

Both rights groups, as well as the Saudi-led military coalition against Yemen and the country's former regime, blamed the purported attack on the Yemeni army, its allied fighters from the Popular Committees and the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

Later on Monday, however, the Yemeni army denied any involvement in the alleged attack in the city of Ta'izz, which is under control of the armed militia operating for the Saudi-backed former regime of Yemen.

"We categorically deny what was reported by some of the media of the aggression and their mercenaries regarding the targeting of a women's prison in Ta'izz province by the army forces and the Popular Committees," Saree said in a press release.

"Such false news does not conceal the criminal nature of the enemy and will not absolve it from the crimes committed against the Yemeni nation," the Arabic-language al-Masirah television network further quoted him as saying.

The Saudi-led military coalition forges such false news against the Yemeni army and its allied forces in an attempt to conceal its losses and repeated defeats in the front lines, al-Masirah said in its report, adding that such fabrications are employed to distract attention of the international community from the massacres committed in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in order to bring Hadi back to power and crush Ansarullah.

The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives over the past five years.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have purchased billions of dollars' worth of weapons from the United States, France and the United Kingdom in their war on Yemen.

Riyadh and its allies have been widely criticized for the high civilian death toll resulted from their bombing campaign in Yemen.

The UN says over 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger.

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