Detainees in Aden Security Prisons

August 1st, 2021

In search of a livelihood, Al-Jashmi Ahmed, a 33-year-old Qat seller came with his wife and three daughters from Dhamar Governorate to the city of Aden. A twist of fate led instead to Al-Jashmi being subjected to various forms of torture by Aden jailers, a horrible welcome very unlike this city and its good residents.

On Sunday, October 12, 2020, three of Al-Jashmi’s workers were arrested by a security force affiliated with the Basateen Police Department from the small hotel where they were staying in Dar Saad district, and they had the capital amount of their trade.

The next day, Al-Jashmi decided to go to the Dar Saad district police station to find out why they were arrested – assuming that there would be a functioning state that would listen to his complaint. However, he did not return. What he never thought was that going to the police station to seek help would cause him to be detained as well.

The morning after he was arrested, he called his wife Nabila (pseudonym) and told her that he was detained at the Al-Basateen Police Station.

Life suddenly became bleak in the eyes of 28-year-old Nabila. However, she did not give up and decided to seek help to save her husband from prison. She called Abdullah Al-Hayyi, a Qat seller and a close friend of her husband in Dhamar. Abdullah and his wife Hanan (pseudonym) immediately came to Aden to speak with their friends and acquaintances there who might help get their friend released. However, what happened next was faster and more terrible than a man trying to help could have imagined.

Four days after Al-Jashmi was arrested, he was brought back to his house at four o’clock in the morning on the shoulders of soldiers. The soldiers searched his house and beat Al-Jashmi in front of his wife and the wife of his friend Abdullah.

The soldiers then arrested the two women and put them in a small black car, heading for Abdullah Al-Hayyi’s residence. They arrested Abdullah and all those who were with him: his brothers, nephew, and his workers who work in selling Qat. Around twenty soldiers in two military cars and another black car took them all towards Al-Basateen police station.

In the police station, Al-Jashmi’s wife Nabila, tried to defend her husband. The charges against him were related to his alleged connection to a recent bombing and having a relationship with Ansar Allah (Houthis). Nabila tried to refute the charges, explaining that her husband had only come to Aden to earn a living. However, the chief of the police station accused her of lying to cover up her husband’s actions.

Nabila told Mwatana Organization for Human Rights about the difficult hours she experienced in the police station:

“The chief of the police station and his assistants beat my husband in front of me with a stick and slapped him in the face. His eyes were swollen and surrounded by bruises and blue circles, and his face was bleeding. When the interrogator asked him to confess again, and he asked, ‘confess what?’ But this time they had a new response ready.”

Nabila revealed how the jailors threatened to harm her in order to force her husband to confess. He replied: “I will confess whatever you want, provided you release my wife and let her leave the station.” Nabila said that multiple forced confessions were taken from her husband using the same threat along with psychological pressure.

Abdullah, too, initially resisted the soldiers and rejected the charges made against him. Nabila recounted how the jailors also threatened to harm his wife Hanan (pseudonym).

Blood dripping from all over his body, Abdullah gave them the confessions they wanted in exchange for his wife’s release. Nabila and Hanan were then driven in the same black car back to their house. The soldier who drove them advised them to leave Aden as soon as possible. They immediately returned to Dhamar city.

The story has not ended here, as Al-Jashmi, Abdullah, and the rest of the detainees in this incident are still in custody. As of the writing this blog, no one knows what has happened to them and what their fate is.