SANAA = At least seven people were killed including four policemen who clashed with a dissident army unit, as hundreds of thousands of anti-regime protesters rallied across Yemen on Wednesday. “Police attacked an army checkpoint in Amran province,” 170 kilometres (105 miles) north of Sanaa, “killing one officer and wounding two soldiers,” a military official told AFP. The four policemen died as the security forces traded fire with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades in the incident late on Tuesday, he said.
The targeted army unit operates under the commander of northwest Yemen’s military region, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, who has sided with the protesters and accused regime supporters of trying to assassinate him, the official said. In the south of the country, soldiers on Wednesday shot dead two anti-regime protesters and wounded 9 others in different sectors of the port city of Aden, medics and witnesses said. They said the army opened fire as protesters tried to set up roadblocks to enforce a partial general strike, which demonstrators have vowed to stage in Aden every Saturday and Wednesday until President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s fall.
They were the first deaths for exactly a month in the city, the site of deadly protests between late February and early March. Aden’s security chief General Ghazi Ahmed Ali said: “Armed groups from the Common Forum (an alliance of parliamentary groups) and the (secessionist) Southern Movement blocked the roads and tried to break into police stations.” Five civilians and four policemen were wounded in an attack on a station in the district of Al-Mansura, he said.
Protests swept provinces across Yemen on Wednesday in response to calls by the Youth for Change, a coalition of groups that has led anti-Saleh demonstrations since late January. The largest rally was being held in the flashpoint city of Taez, south of Sanaa, where more than 20 people were killed in clashes with security forces earlier this month. Saleh loyalists also took to the streets, but in smaller numbers, in several provinces and chanted their support for the embattled leader.
Yemen’s oil-rich Arab neighbours in the Gulf have urged Saleh, in power since 1978, to ensure a peaceful transition of power to Vice-President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi and a national unity government led by the opposition.
But protesters have rejected the proposal, demanding the fall of Saleh’s entire regime and for the Yemeni strongman to stand trial rather than be granted immunity along with his powerful sons.
Saleh, for his part, has accepted in principle the initiative of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council but without spelling out clearly whether or when he would step down. He has so far insisted on overseeing any transition, fearful of being dumped out of office and faced with prosecution like his ally, Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted on February 11 following mass demonstrations.
