'Scores' of migrants burned to death from Houthi projectiles in Yemen: HRW

Al-Monitor Staff

African migrants receive food and water inside a football stadium in the Red Sea port city of Aden in Yemen, on April 23, 2019. - In the southern city of Aden, bastion of the embattled Yemeni government, nearly 2,000 migrants -- mainly from Ethiopia -- have been rounded up by security and are now confined to a soccer stadium which fails to meet basic standards of health and safety, according to the UN migration agency (IOM). (Photo by - / AFP) (Photo credit should read -/AFP via Getty Images) — African migrants receive food and water inside a soccer stadium in the Red Sea port city of Aden, Yemen, April 23, 2019. — -/AFP via Getty Images

Scores of migrants burned to death when Houthi security forces fired “unidentified projectiles" into an overcrowded detention center in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa earlier this month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said March 16.

According to the New York-based rights group, the mostly Ethiopian detainees were protesting their living conditions on March 7 when Houthi guards rounded hundreds of them up, locked them in a hangar and told them to say “their final prayers” before firing two projectiles into the facility.

“The migrants said the first projectile produced a lot of smoke and made their eyes water and sting. The second, which the migrants called a ‘bomb,’ exploded loudly and started a fire,” HRW said in a statement.

“People were roasted alive,” one migrant told the group. “I had to step on their dead bodies to escape.”

'Scores' of migrants burned to death from Houthi projectiles in Yemen: HRW

Human Rights Watch accused Houthi security forces of firing "unidentified projectiles" into a migrant detention center earlier this month.

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