Saudi Arabia has handed over to fugitive Yemeni President Abed-Rabbou Mansour Hadi’s regime 54 child prisoners who were captured during fighting with the Houthi Ansarullah movement, Yemeni foreign minister said Tuesday.
Abdel-Malek al-Mekhlafi, who heads Hadi’s peace negotiating team, said the children were aged between 8 and 17 years.
Human Rights Watch said this month that both sides in Yemen’s conflict had deployed child soldiers and UNICEF reported that 900 children were killed and 1,300 wounded during the conflict in 2015.
"They (child prisoners) will be freed in addition to those who had been freed in Marib," Mekhlafi said on his Twitter account, referring to a previous prisoner release in a province east of the capital Sana’a.
A coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia intervened in the Yemen conflict in March 2015 when the Houthis advanced on the southern port city of Aden and forced Hadi and his government into exile in Saudi Arabia.
The U.N. special envoy to Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said earlier this week that the parties attending peace talks in Kuwait had agreed to unconditionally free all child prisoners they are holding.
It was not clear how many child prisoners are being held in all, but Yemeni political sources say that the Houthis and the regime submitted in late May a list of nearly 7,000 names of prisoners they say are being held by the other side.
The U.N. has struggled to encourage a prisoner release in Yemen coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Monday, and over a month of negotiations have produced few concrete results.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
