Houthis using poisonous butane gas cylinders to kill Yemenis

Aya Ezz

The violations of the Houthi group against the Yemeni people increase in intensity day after day.

The group had last brought death to the homes of people in Yemeni capital, Sana’a.

It did this through poisoned butane gas cylinders that explode at the time of use, according to a number of Yemeni media outlets.

During the current month, fires and explosions occurring inside houses in the capital caused the death of dozens of families.

The cylinders are filled with a smell-less gas. They easily explode inside the homes at the time of use.

5 million gas cylinders

The new site, News Yemen, had confirmed the existence of 5 million invalid gas cylinders, which were distributed to millions of families.

The Yemeni society, it said, is now waiting for the zero hour to turn hundreds of homes into explosion and deadly bomb arenas.

The site noted that a large number of women were victims of those cylinders.

700 incidents

The Human Rights Office in Sana’a estimates that there have been about 700 explosion incidents, due to cylinder explosions in Sana’a alone.

Almost 900 people cited the same reason for the explosions in different provinces under the control of the Houthi coup group.

The office said the import of poisonous gas cylinders continues, in the light of significant complicity from the Standards and Quality Control Authority in Sana’a, which is controlled by the Houthis.

The authority, it said, allows the entry of these cylinders.

Numerous incidents

The latest of these incidents was the death of a woman, her husband and their infant child when they choked in one of the rooms of their house in one of the neighbourhoods of Sana’a.

The family members inhaled toxic gas that leaked from a household gas cylinder, even as they did not realize that they were letting the gas into their lungs.

On January 11, citizens in the House of Antoush were injured in the explosion of a gas cylinder.

Three children survived the leak of an odourless gas in a house consisting of three floors, in the city of Hababa in Thala Directorate of Amran province.

The explosion caused the collapse of the entire house.

A few days earlier, a doctor and her child died as a result of an explosion of a household gas cylinder in Sana’a.

Terrorist abdication of responsibility

Following these incidents, the Houthi coup came out through the Sana’s gas company with a set of false statements, trying to evade its responsibility for these incidents.

The coup militias were not satisfied with the false statements, as they accused the government company Safir, located in Marib province, of causing these incidents, which resulted in hundreds of victims, most of whom were women and children.

Filled upon arrival

Director of the Human Rights Office in Sana’a, Fahmi al-Zubairi, said poisonous butane gas cylinders enter Yemen through Houthi ships from the Port of Hudaydah.

When they arrive at the port, he said, those cylinders are emptied of their gas and then filled with an odourless poisonous gas.

He told The Reference that after filling the cylinders, the Houthis sell them to citizens.

Yemeni journalist and editor-in-chief of the news site, Capital, Nabil Salah, said the poisonous gas cylinders are filled with a certain gas that does not have any smell.

People, he said, do not notice this gas.

Salah confirmed in statement to The Reference that the extremist group enters large quantities of adulterated fuel and toxic chemicals that are placed in butane gas cylinders through affiliated companies, technicians and engineers.

He revealed that the one cylinder is sold to ordinary people for 6,900 riyals.