Monday, January 2, 2012

Eleven Yemeni coastguards drowned

Eleven Yemeni coastguards, including three officers, were found dead and six others rescued when their boat capsized
By Saeed Al Batati, Correspondent
January 2, 2012
Sana'a: Eleven Yemeni coastguards, including three officers, were found dead and six others rescued when their boat capsized in the Red Sea off the western port province of Hudieda, Yemen Ministry of Defence reported on Monday.
The 17-crew boat had a machine fault before it was struck by a tidal wave, which turned it upside down. The coast guards found three bodies.
The ministry accused media affiliated with the opposition of exploiting the incident to incite the soldiers to revolt against their commanders. Also, a protester was killed outside a government facility in the southern port city of Aden. He was standing with a group of workers staging a sit-in outside their offices to demand the resignation of their manager.
A local journalist from the city told Gulf News that the protester was shot dead by the manager's nephew. The killing of the worker only further angered the protesters who demanded the prosecution of the manager.
Yemen is experiencing a surge of protests and public strikes against government officials appointed during the reign of outgoing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. A couple of days ago, Saleh denounced the public strikes and indirectly accused the opposition of encouraging workers to take over the public offices.
"There is a growing chaos spreading across some ministries and government offices. We are working to contain them as to stop them from bringing down these institutes," he said in a meeting with the party.

Missing French Journalist Found Strangled in Yemen

December 2, 2011
A French-Algerian journalist who was found strangled by an electrical cord in a hotel room in the Yemeni Capital of Sanaa had been missing for four days before his body was discovered on Monday. The journalist hasn't yet been named, nor has the media company for which he worked. France 24 denied an early report that he worked there, after Reuters reported that police had found a France 24 identification card on him. The man was found in the hotel Al-Maali, which is "near the presidential palace in an area controlled by Yemen's Republican Guard, an elite force commanded by the son of President Ali Abdullah Saleh," the Associated Press reports. "The guards have been battling renegade troops and armed tribesmen in Sanaa for months as Saleh tries to cling to power in the face of a popular uprising demanding he step down and stand trial.
" On Twitter, a fellow Yemen-based French journalist, Benjamin Wiacek, has already started suggesting a conspiracy theory, positing that the man was not a journalist at all, but some kind of government agent carrying a fake identification card. With so little information released, however, the case remains a mystery to almost everybody.