Report Reveals Saudi Border Guards’ Involvement in Deaths of Hundreds of Migrants

According to the story, hundreds of people have reportedly been shot to death, many of them Ethiopians trying to enter Saudi Arabia through a war-torn Yemen.

 According to migrants who spoke to the BBC, they saw dead dumped on the routes and had limbs removed by gunshots. Prior to this, Saudi Arabia has denied claims of systematic executions.

 As they sought to cross the border in pursuit of employment in the oil-rich country, large groups of Ethiopians, including many women and children, came under fire. Migrants who were contacted separately by the BBC described these harrowing nighttime crossings.

 The firing continued, Mustafa Soufia Mohammed, 21, told the BBC.
He claimed that when trying to cross the border illegally in July of last year, members of his 45-person group of migrants were slain when they came under fire.

Around 200,000 migrants a year try a dangerous sea crossing from the Horn of Africa to Yemen and then on to Saudi Arabia, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration. According to human rights organizations, many suffer from detention and physical abuse along the journey.

The crossing of the sea is hazardous enough. More than 24 migrants were listed as missing last week after a shipwreck off the coast of Djibouti. Graves of migrants who have perished on the trip are strewn along Yemen’s main migration routes.

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Horrific Abuses at Yemen-Saudi Border Crossings

Two years ago, the Houthi rebels, who rule the majority of northern Yemen, set fire to a detention facility in the country’s capital, Sanaa, killing dozens of migrants. But, the new HRW report describes abuses that are different in scope and kind.

 The report, which outlines 28 individual events employing explosive weapons and 14 close-range shootings, covers the time period from March 2022 through June of this year. According to the authors, due to the distances between border crossings and the difficulty in locating survivors, it is difficult to say for sure how many individuals have died.

The Saudi government asserted that it took the accusations seriously but vehemently disagreed with the UN’s description of the executions as widespread or systematic. Nevertheless, based on its own interviews with survivors, the Mixed Migration Centre, a global research network, revealed further allegations of killings along the border last month.

 The article provides vivid descriptions of the employment of machine guns and mortars to strike sizable crowds of terrified people, caught migrants being asked by Saudi border guards which leg they wish to be shot through, and rotting corpses being thrown over the border area.

 The Human Rights Watch study is the most thorough to date, including numerous eyewitness accounts, satellite photos of the alleged locations of many of the deaths, as well as improvised graveyards.

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Source: BBC