Secret Brotherhood prisons: Yemeni Socialists expose Islah’s crimes

Ali Ragab

With the continued phenomenon of enforced disappearances and kidnappings among the people of Taiz, who reject the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to control the governorate, The Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) announced the organization of protest activities on Monday, June 24 against the Brotherhood’s influence in the governorate.

The YSP said it would hold a protest in front of the Education Ministry, coinciding with the third anniversary of the disappearance of socialists Ayoub al-Salhi and Akram Hamid.

In the first week of May, the Committee for the Follow-up of the Enforcedly Disappeared organized a protest in Taiz to demand disclosing the fate of those who disappeared in the Brotherhood’s secret prisons, seeking swift intervention by the Yemeni government and Arab and international human rights organizations.

According to Yemeni media sources, there are about 10 secret prisons run by the Muslim Brotherhood, which practice the worst forms of torture and crimes against detainees, who are those from Taiz who reject the schemes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen and the governorate.

According to Ali Sarhan al-Sharabi, the director of the human rights office in Taiz, there are about 2,700 people who have been forcibly disappeared or whose fates are unknown, and many are believed to be detained in Islah’s secret prisons in Taiz.

For his part, Nazar Haitham, leader of the Yemeni Transitional Council, said that the crimes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Taiz are numerous and escalating every day. He added that anyone who opposes the Brotherhood and their project faces arrest, repression and assassination, pointing out that Islah formed a state within a state in Taiz, controlling the governorate as an Islamist emirate.

Haitham called on the southern leadership and international human rights organizations to move quickly against all human rights violators in the governorate and those who are involved in enforced disappearances, as well as to bring the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood involved in these crimes to trial.