Human Rights Watch provided an account of the burning killing of dozens of Ethiopians in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, based on testimonies from survivors, and issued a report calling on the Houthi group to punish those involved in the incident.
The organization said that dozens of migrants, most of them Ethiopians, died after the launch of unidentified projectiles at a detention center for immigrants in Sanaa on the 7th of this March.
The organization quoted immigrants' testimonies stating that the Houthis fired shells at a warehouse where about 550 Ethiopian immigrants are being held, in an attempt to end a hunger strike that the detainees started to protest against ill-treatment.
Human Rights Watch called on the Houthi authorities to hold those responsible accountable and stop detaining migrants in poor, life-threatening facilities.
The Houthis announced a few days ago that the bodies of 43 Ethiopians were buried in Sanaa, who were killed in the fire, and this was followed by criticism of the Houthis' rush to burial operations, without revealing the details of the incident and the perpetrators.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera, the organization's researcher, Nadia Hardman, told the details of what happened in the immigration detention center in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
She said that the migrants were demonstrating during a hunger strike due to their poor conditions in the detention center. “On that day they refused to eat and the guards began beating some of the detainees, and they responded with some skirmishes.”
She added, "After that I brought reinforcements from the guards, who went up to a high place where the detention ward was, and fired projectiles towards a closed hall where hundreds of detainees of the Ethiopian majority are present.
The Houthi novel
However, the Undersecretary of the Yemeni Ministry of Information of the Houthis, Nasreddin Amer, denied the validity of what was stated in the "Human Rights Watch" report regarding the killing of a number of Ethiopian refugees in a detention center in Sana'a.
He said - in an interview with Al-Jazeera - that what happened was not a targeting of the camp, but rather violence that erupted between Ethiopian and Somali refugees, and that security personnel intervened to break up the fight.
Amer confirmed that the investigation in the case is continuing, and that punishment will affect anyone who is proven involved in committing a crime.
In a related context, 140 Ethiopian immigrants arrived in Addis Ababa from Yemen, in the first trip carried out by the International Organization for Migration between the two countries as part of the voluntary humanitarian return program since the outbreak of the new Corona virus pandemic.
According to the International Organization for Migration, thousands of other migrants are still stranded in other Yemeni cities such as Marib, where the organization hopes to expand the return programs for these migrants soon.