Yemeni Protesters Under Heavy Fire

SANA, Yemen — Security forces and government supporters opened fire on demonstrators on Friday, killing at least 30, as the largest protest so far in Yemen came under violent and sustained attack in the center of the capital, Sana.

A medic helped an injured anti-government protester in Sana on Friday.

The toll mounted rapidly through the afternoon, as some of the more than 100 people wounded by gunfire or rocks hurled by government supporters succumbed to their injuries, according to several doctors at a makeshift hospital near the protest site.
A heavy cloud of black smoke rose over a downtown commercial district at the southern end of the protest, which swelled to tens of thousands of people and stretched for a mile from its center at Sana University.
Government supporters in plain clothes fired down on the demonstration from rooftops and windows almost immediately after the protesters rose from their noon prayers, conducted en masse in the street on Friday.
The shooting dwarfed the level of violence in previous clashes between supporters of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and protesters, who have called for the president’s ouster in weeks of large protests in cities around Yemen. But a crowd of mostly tribal men from the outskirts of the capital appeared to stand firm in the face of the chaotic attack by the government supporters.
A man walked through the crowd with a microphone yelling, “Peaceful, peaceful! Don’t be afraid of the bullets!”
Security forces, massed in large numbers at the protest’s south end, opened fire with guns and a water cannon, apparently in an effort to keep demonstrators from moving further into the center of the capital. Antigovernment protesters fought back, hurling rocks at security forces.
The shooting appeared to stop for a time during the mid-afternoon, and large crowds of protesters returned to the area.
Scores of injured men were carried in bloody blankets through the crowd to a mosque that had been turned into a makeshift hospital, with the dead and wounded lying on its floor. Many of the wounded appeared to have been hurt by rocks as well as bullets.
It could not immediately be determined whether the bullets fired were live rounds or rubber bullets. At least one protester was killed when he was shot in the head at close range.
Some of the men in the protest raided buildings where gunmen had been seen. The men peeked out of windows and flashed peace signs to indicate to the crowd below that they were not, themselves, snipers. In one raid at a far edge of the protest, a man said to be a sniper was caught and beaten by angry demonstrators. Protesters pulled another suspected sniper from an apartment overlooking the demonstration, and said that they found military uniforms and Defense Ministry identification in the apartment.
As the violence escalated, many people in central Sana took cover. “Today is the worst day; this is a new Qaddafi,” said Khalil al-Zekry, who hunkered down in his video shop along the protest route.
Tensions have increased in the capital. Clashes broke out last weekend at the continuing sit-in near the university. But during those clashes, the security forces generally used tear gas and fired into the air rather than at protesters.
In an attempt to quell opposition, Mr. Saleh has offered concessions, including a promise not to run for a new term in 2013 and a proposal to hand over some powers to Parliament. But demonstrators and the political opposition have rejected his proposals, out of suspicion that Mr. Saleh, an American ally in the fight against terrorism, would find a way to extend his 32-year-rule once protests subsided.
With the protests showing no sign of winding down, the government appeared on Friday to take up the same violent playbook deployed this week in Libya and Bahrain to combat widening unrest in those countries.
Ibrahim Raja, an accountant who had protested against Mr. Saleh’s rule on Friday but then fled the violence, stressed the peaceful nature of the demonstrations, opening his coat to show that he had no weapon. The Yemeni population, among the poorest in the Arab world, is also among the most heavily armed.
“All of us have a weapon in house,” he said. “None of us have our weapons here.”

Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and J. David Goodman from New York.

source: nytimes

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