Aden: Yemeni authorities have released 25 activists hours after they were arrested in the south following deadly clashes between police and separatists, activists said on Sunday.
The capital of the formerly independent South Yemen, Aden, was cautiously calm on Sunday, a day after a gathering by separatists commemorating the north’s seizure of the south in 1994 turned into a gunbattle.
Two protesters were killed and one man was left “clinically dead” in the clashes which took place in Aden’s Mansoura district, a medical official from Al Naqib hospital said.
Further east, in the town of Seyun in Hadramaut province, one protester was killed and four others were wounded on Saturday when police opened fire on another group of demonstrators, activists said.
Meanwhile, 25 activists, including Yahia Saleh Said, deputy head of the Southern Movement’s superior council who were arrested were released a few hours later on Saturday,” activist Ghassan Al Shuaibi said.
The Southern Movement, which complains the region has been marginalised by the central government in Sanaa, is demanding autonomy, or even independence. Southern Yemen was a separate nation before 1990.
Meanwhile, Yemen will resume oil exports from its Maarib province by next week following violence which halted shipments for over a year and led to losses of up to $15 million a day, Yemen’s oil minister said on Saturday.
Yemen’s oil and gas pipelines have long been a target of attacks by militants in the unstable and impoverished country, but attacks on energy infrastructure have become more frequent since anti-government protests last year created a power vacuum.
The country’s main Maarib oil pipeline was the target of three consecutive attacks in October last year alone.
“The technical teams that are being protected by the military will finish repairs of the pipeline this week,” Hisham Sharaf said on Saturday. “We will begin to pump oil from the Maarib fields to the port of Ras Eisa on the Red Sea by next week.”
Yemen’s location on the strategically important Bab Al Mandab strait, through which millions of barrels of oil are shipped between Asia, Europe and the Americas, makes instability there a risk to global trade.
