SANAA/ADEN, (Reuters) – Protests spread across Yemen today demanding an end to the president’s three decades in power, and a demonstrator died in clashes with police in the south, witnesses and medical sources said.
In the southern port of Aden, residents said around 500 protesters had turned on police who fired in the air to disperse the crowd. Two men were injured by stray bullets and two others by tear gas. Mohammed Alwani, 21, died from a gunshot wound, doctors said.
Alwani was the first protester known by Reuters to have died in three weeks of protests that have grown increasingly violent.
“My boy has died, and I’m in mourning,” Alwani’s father told Reuters by telephone.
Angry protesters surrounded a police office in Aden and a few men who broke away from the crowd set ablaze a municipal building and several cars, residents told Reuters.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a U.S. ally against al Qaeda who has been in power of the fractious Arabian Peninsula State for 32 years, was quoted by Yemen’s state news agency as saying unrest was a foreign plot to create chaos in Arab countries.
“There are plans to try and sink the region into a fervour of chaos and violence, and they have targeted the security of the region and stability of our countries,” Saleh was quoted as saying in a phone call to Bahrain’s king to express support for the Gulf Arab kingdom, which also facing intensifying protests.
Residents in Aden told Reuters that another six protesters were hurt in ongoing clashes, and police had again opened fire.
The threat of turmoil in Yemen, struggling to quash a resurgent wing of al Qaeda and keep rebellions at bay in its north and south, pushed Saleh to say he would step down in 2013 and call for a national dialogue that the opposition accepted.
But anti-government protests have continued.
“No more marginalisation of the people of Aden! No more corruption and oppression,” protesters shouted. Most demonstrators were from among the unemployed youth in Yemen, where the jobless rate is at least 35 percent.
“Protest, protest till the regime falls!” they chanted.
Of the 23 million people in Yemen, which is teetering on the brink of collapse into a failed state, 40 percent live on less than $2 a day and a third suffer chronic hunger. Jobs are scarce, corruption is rife, and the population is expanding rapidly even as oil and water resources are drying up.
