50 killed in Saudi-led raid on Houthi prison in Yemen

SANAA, Yemen (AA) – At least 50 people were killed and scores injured in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike on a prison in southwestern Yemen, Houthi rebels said Sunday.

Rebel spokesman Mohamed Abdul-Salam said on Twitter that 100 people were injured in the attack, which targeted a detention center in the city of Dhamar.

The Saudi-led coalition said in a statement the airstrikes targeted a site storing drones and missiles.

Local residents, however, said it was a detention center in the city that was hit.

"The prison is known to the coalition and the Red Cross, which visited the site several times," Abdul-Qadir al-Murtada, the head of a Houthi-run committee for prisoner affairs, said on Facebook.

In 2015, a Houthi-run detention center in Dhamar was struck by a Saudi-led coalition airstrike, killing at least 25 prisoners.

At the time, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government accused Houthi rebels of using prisoners as human shields.

Yemen has remained wracked by violence since 2014, when the Iran-aligned Houthi group overran much of the country, including the capital Sanaa.

The conflict escalated the following year when Saudi Arabia and its Sunni-Arab allies launched a massive air campaign aimed at rolling back Houthi gains in Yemen and supporting the country’s pro-Saudi government.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in the raging conflict since 2016, according to UN estimates.