Sanaa, Yemen: Yemen’s rebel-controlled interior ministry on Monday announced the “killing” of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, as a video emerged showing what appeared to be Saleh’s corpse.
“The interior ministry announces the end of the crisis of militias and the killing of their leader and a number of his criminal supporters,” an anchor said on the rebels’ official Al-Masirah television, referring to armed supporters of Saleh.
A video provided to AFP by the rebels showed what appeared to be a dead Saleh, wrapped in a floral-print blanket with a severe head injury.
Official Houthi TV station broadcasts footage of #Saleh |'s dead body pic.twitter.com/Wazie30nSO
— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) December 4, 2017
The video showed armed men loading the body into the back of a pick-up truck in an empty, sandy lot.
One of the men shouted “death to Israel” — a slogan popular among the Houthi.
The General People’s Congress, Saleh’s political party, did not immediately confirm or deny the news.
The Yemeni strongman, who ruled for 33 years before his 2012 ouster, on Saturday had announced the end of his alliance with the Iran-backed Houthi, sparking warnings of retribution from the rebels.
Saleh had joined ranks with the Houthi in 2014 — for decades his bitter enemies — to drive Yemen’s Saudi-backed government out of the capital and set up a parallel administration in which the rebels now control the interior ministry.
With inputs from AFP