Asia

Home page

Asia

Yemeni vice president urges ceasefire in Taiz

02 December 2011 22:55 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Yemeni Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi on Friday urged rival forces in the country’s southern city of Taiz to cease fire, the state-run Saba news agency reported, following three-day clashes that left 32 people dead, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

"Hadi ordered Taiz governor and leaders of the opposition coalition Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) to quickly cease fire in the city and form a joint committee to immediately withdraw the government troops and opposition militia," Saba cited an official statement as saying.

Prime Minister Mohamed Basindwa on Friday urged Hadi to order the troops loyal to the ruling party to stop shelling the residential neighborhoods of Taiz city by threatening to " reconsider the process of forming the national consensus government."

Taiz, some 200 km south of the capital Sanaa, is a key hotbed of the opposition’s 11-month-old protests seeking to prosecute outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh who signed last week in the Saudi capital of Riyadh a Gulf-brokered deal for transferring power.

The three-day violence in Taiz left at least 32 people from both sides killed and more than 40 others injured.

Witnesses said the clashes took place in almost all streets of the city’s crowded neighborhoods, in which hundreds of the buildings were wrecked by random rounds and the city’s residents began to flee to villages.

Basindwa is due to announce his interim cabinet with equal seats from the opposition coalition and the ruling party on Saturday or Sunday, according to the opposition’s spokesman Mohamed Qahtan, after the rival parties agreed Thursday on the cabinet’s line-up in accordance with the Gulf Cooperation Council deal.