Return of 17 Fishermen kidnapped by US-Saudi Forces in the Red Sea

The General Authority for Fisheries in the Red Sea received 17 fishermen Monday at the landing center in Al-Lahya District, after they were kidnapped by the forces of the US-Saudi aggression in the Red Sea.

Director General of Ports and Landing Centers at the authority, Aziz Al-Atini, said that the fishermen, who were kidnapped by the forces of aggression on the seventh anniversary of the massacre of Uqban Island, almost died as a result of hunger and thirst.

He stressed that the ugliness of this crime is no less than the crime of the Uqban massacre in its brutality.

The US-Saudi aggression shot fire to kill innocent fishermen in Uqban, and it kidnaped those fishermen today, leaving them on an uninhabited island to let them alone starve to death.

The fishermen said that they were surprised by a military boat carrying Saudi soldiers who kidnapped them from the island of Baklan and Fisht, confiscating their boats with generators, getting rid of all their property, including nets, equipment and fish, and throwing them by force into the sea.

They explained that the kidnappers treated them in a brutal and inhumane way, and dropped them on the uninhabited island of Sana, after holding them for more than three days.

Saudi Arabia and many of its allies have been waging a war on Yemen since 2015 to restore power to the country’s Riyadh-friendly former officials. The war and a simultaneous siege that the US-Saudi-led coalition has been enforcing on the country has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis.

The invasion has pushed entire Yemen close to the brink of outright famine, turning the country into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Coastal communities in Yemen have suffered greatly in the ongoing bloody war. Fishing boats, ports and processing sites have been destroyed or damaged, and many fishermen have lost their lives.

The US-Saudi-led coalition launched airstrikes which hit fishing boats and markets, and mines were laid in the sea making the waters treacherous. To make matters worse, the exacerbation of piracy and attacks by the Eritrean authorities and the aggression forces against fishermen on the Yemeni coasts.

As of August 2019, at least 334 fishermen had been reported killed or injured since 2015, according to statistics from Yemen’s fisheries authority. Others had been arrested and had their boats seized, while some were now detained in Saudi-run prisons in Yemen.

Local reports estimate that of Yemen’s approximate 100,000 fishermen, since 2015 over a third (37,000) have quit and thus lost their income.