Horrific patterns of torture catalogued in Yemen’s unofficial prisons
More than 1,000 people have been arbitrarily detained and hundreds tortured by Yemen's warring parties, finds a new report.
Yemen’s warring parties are using secret prisons to disappear and torture detainees, according to a grim new report from a leading human rights group.
The Mwatana Organization for Human Rights documented 1,605 cases of arbitrary detention, 770 cases of forced disappearance and 344 cases of torture at 11 detention centers across Yemen since 2016. Some of the abuse may amount to war crimes, the group said.
"This report confirms one fact: that all parties to the conflict are involved in committing arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and of course the torture," said Osamah Alfakih, Mwatana’s director of communications and advocacy. "They do this because the accountability has been absent for a very long time."
Drawing on more than 2,500 interviews with former detainees, the 87-page report released Tuesday determined the Iran-aligned Houthi group was responsible for a majority of the detention-related abuse with 904 of the arbitrary or abusive detentions, 353 cases of forced disappearance, 138 cases of torture and 27 deaths in detention.
