7 killed, 22 injured in Taez Shelling attacks

A little girl who was killed during the attacks The U.N. envoy to Yemen, Jamal Benomar, is due to submit a report to the Security Council on Yemen, based on his two-week visit to the impoverished state, Al Arabiya reported on Wednesday. Benomar arrived in Yemen last month to try to resolve the deteriorating political crisis and left Sana’a on Monday without managing to broker a solution.
In an interview with Al Arabiya, Benomar said that the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has reiterated his commitment to bringing the Gulf initiative into action, but the deteriorating conditions in Yemen did not indicate any possibility of a new political process in the country. The opposition cast doubt on any future dialogue with the government, which it blamed for the apparent failure of mediation attempts by Benomar. “The dialogue with the regime has stopped and there is no form of dialogue after Saleh wasted all opportunities for dialogue, which led to the departure of the U.N. envoy,” opposition spokesman Mohammed al-Sabri said.
Meanwhile, shelling attacks on the southwest Yemeni town of Taez, a hotbed of anti-regime protest, left seven civilians dead and 22 others injured Tuesday, a medical source said.
Local residents were targeted in four parts of the town by the elite Republican Guard and special police units. They launched appeals for help but were unable to get the victims to safety, the source said. The attacks continued into the night, he added, without giving any information on what sparked the bombardment, according to AFP. “Government forces, from the hills and from security barricades, and from al-Thawra hospital and Freedom Square, they are shelling,” Abdulkader al-Guneid, a resident in Taez, told Reuters. “There are all kinds of flashes and bangs, and we can hear it in the residential areas. Then, sometimes it is interrupted with an exchange of fire,” he added.
State television blamed opposition fighters for starting the fighting and said four government troops had been wounded. Taez, 270 kilometers (170 miles) southwest of Sana’a, is one of the main focuses of the protest movement against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Earlier Tuesday, shells fired into a popular shopping district of Yemen’s capital killed two civilians as demonstrators called for the president to be put on trial. Tens of thousands of people marched in Sana’a Tuesday calling for Saleh’s ouster and trial, AFP reported. Saleh, in power for 33 years, has so far refused to resign despite the wave of popular protests that has swept the country since January demanding that he step down.
A doctor said a mortar round hit a market in a district contested by government troops and those of rebel general Ali Mohsen, a former Saleh ally. One of the dead was aged 14. The doctor said he had received death threats for helping the wounded and a bag of bullets was thrown into his yard as a warning. “We are treating these protesters and civilians but the government wants to threaten us to stop us doing our job. Now they are threatening my family,” he said, according to Reuters. Last month in Sana’a, political deadlock gave way to a military showdown between Saleh loyalists and Mohsen’s forces. More than 100 people were killed in the fighting, most of them protesters caught in the middle. The upheaval is fanning global fears that weakening state control may help al-Qaeda’s local wing expand its foothold in Yemen, which borders oil giant Saudi Arabia and lies near shipping routes through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.