SANA’A (Dispatches) – The first group of freed prisoners from the Yemeni army and fighters from their allied Popular Committees has arrived in the country’s southern coastal city of Aden.
Saudi-led coalition spokesman General Turki al-Malki said in a statement that three stages of airlifting prisoners to Sana’a and Aden would be completed on Friday.
According to Saudi-owned al-Arabiya and al-Hadath television networks, the first plane, operated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), carried 40 of the released prisoners to the Aden airport.
Dubai-based channels added that the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen would free 108 prisoners.
A spokesman for the ICRC told AFP that the organization was “facilitating the transfer of more than 100 former Yemeni detainees from Saudi Arabia to Yemen.”
The spokesman, Basheer Omar, said there would be three ICRC flights from the Saudi city of Abha to Aden.
Last week, Malki said the Riyadh-led military alliance would release 163 prisoners from the Yemeni army and Popular Committees.
The coalition had already begun taking measures to release the prisoners in coordination with the ICRC, he said.
Earlier, Abdul Qader al-Murtada, head of the prisoner affairs committee in Yemen’s Sana’a-based National Salvation Government, said Yemeni authorities had made a new offer to the UN that included freeing 200 prisoners by each side.
The last major prisoner exchange, involving approximately 1,000 detainees, took place in 2020 as part of confidence-building steps agreed upon at the last peace talks held in 2018.
Meanwhile, a Yemeni military official says the Saudi-led coalition forces and their allied militant groups have breached more than 5,000 times a UN-brokered nationwide truce, which went into effect more than a month ago with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
The official, who requested not to be named, told Yemen’s official Saba news agency on Thursday that the 5,365 violations included ground operations, infiltration attempts, air raids, overflights by Apache attack helicopters and reconnaissance drones, barrages of missiles and artillery rounds and shooting incidents.
He pointed out that the Riyadh-led military alliance either detains or delays the arrival of fuel ships destined for Yemen, and does not allow commercial flights to land at or depart from Sana’a International Airport.
The official said that the violations have resulted in the death and injury of several ordinary Yemenis, and damage to their property and farms.
Meanwhile, a high-ranking Yemeni health official said Thursday that at least 12 critically-ill Yemeni patients in need of life-saving treatment abroad lost their lives, while waiting for flights promised by the UN and the Saudi-led coalition,.
Head of Yemen’s Supreme Medical Committee, Dr. Mutahar al-Darwish, denounced the coalition’s refusal to open Sana’a airport in accordance with the two-month UN-brokered truce, stating that the facility remains shut to humanitarian flights despite the fact that half of the ceasefire has passed.
Darwish said the deaths proved the falsehood of international organizations’ claims about humanity and aiding innocent civilians.
The continued restrictions imposed on Yemen’s airspace by the Saudi-led coalition have negatively affected critically-ill patients as they had completed necessary procedures in order to travel to the Jordanian capital Amman.