Border guards in Saudi Arabia have regularly opened fire on African migrants seeking to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, killing hundreds of men, women and children in a recent 15-month period, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Monday.
The guards have beaten the migrants with rocks and bars, forced male migrants to rape women while guards watched and shot detained migrants in their limbs, leading to permanent injuries and amputations, the report said.
The shooting of migrants is “widespread and systematic,” it said, adding that if killing them were Saudi government policy, it would constitute a crime against humanity.
A Saudi government statement dismissed the report as inaccurate.
“The allegations included in the Human Rights Watch report about Saudi border guards shooting Ethiopians while they were crossing the Saudi-Yemeni border are unfounded and not based on reliable sources,” the statement said.
The report provides chilling new details about the conditions along one of the world’s most dangerous smuggling routes, a patch of isolated, war-ravaged territory rarely visited by journalists, aid workers or other international observers.
It focuses on the plight of migrants from Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries, who seek to enter Saudi Arabia — the Arab world’s richest nation and one of the globe’s largest oil exporters — and on the increasingly harsh efforts by the kingdom’s security forces to keep migrants out.
Faisal Othman, a migrant from Ethiopia, told The New York Times that he was trying to cross the border with about 200 others last September when a projectile exploded near the group and shrapnel tore apart the women around him. » | Ben Hubbard and Shuaib Almosawa, Reporting from Istanbul and New Delhi | Monday, August 21, 2023
All done, of course, “In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful”! Allah is generous (كريم), most merciful (رحيم). – © Mark Alexander
