Hundreds of police storms Yemen Interior Ministry

The capital police briefly stormed the Interior Ministry in protest of deployment into southern regions and being replaced by what they called “Islamist militants”, a security source said.

The security source, who declined to be named for lack of authorization to talk to the press, said that eighty percent of the capital’s police and those in the suburbs of Sana’a protested on Saturday against the minister’s new deployment strategy. “They were about 400 of them” the officer said. “They tried get into the minister’s office, but then Hansh [deputy minister] promised to keep them in Sana’a” said the security source, who works in an affiliate department of the ministry.

The capital police, according to the security source, are responsible for the security of the Sana’a and the surroundings districts of the capital.

The source said that the angry police officers said those intended to replace them were of the newly added officers, due to graduate on October 14, the minister has been recruiting since he took office in the beginning of 2012.

Based on official memos leaked to the Yemen Observer in September, the minister of interior ordered the recruitment of hundreds of people believed to be from Islamist background, including wanted militants and foreigners from Saudi Arabia.
The interior minister, Abdul Qader Qahtan, was appointed in 2012 from the opposition share of half the government portfolios as stated by the GCC deal

The deal sought an end to the political impasse between the opposition group lead by the Islah Party and the then ruling Party, General People Congress, lead by former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.

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