One person was killed and 16 others wounded in clashes with security forces Wednesday in south Yemen, where separatist sentiments run deep, witnesses and medical officials said. The fighting broke out as demonstrators clashed with security forces in the city of Daleh, when protesters took to the streets to demand the release of people arrested during recent unrest, witnesses said. Witnesses and an inde-pendent news site said security forces tried to break up a demonstration of thousands from the opposition “Southern Movement”. A hospital official in the city said that one demonstrator died from gunfire injuries, while seven others were wounded in the clashes. Seven soldiers and two policemen were also wounded in the fighting, witnesses and medical officials said. Supporters of Tareq Al-Fadhli took to the streets of Zinjibar, the capital of the southern Abyan province, also to demand the release of people arrested in recent months, a local official said. “News Yemen” said the demonstrators attacked govern-ment buildings, removing Yemeni flags. Pictures on the site showed them bearing the flag of the former South Yemen, which united with the north in 1990. - Agencies Around 40 people have been killed in clashes with security forces since April in the impoverished south, where the population feels economically and socially marginalised, and dozens have been arrested. Fadhli, a former key ally of the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been leading the protests in south Yemen. The authorities are demanding that he surrender or leave the country, sources close to him said. The Sana'a government has blamed the unrest on rebels demanding secession of the south. Socialists who formerly ruled the south led a secession bid in 1994 that sparked a two-month civil war before the uprising was crushed by northern forces loyal to Saleh. The unrest in the south comes as government forces are engaged in fighting with Shiite rebels in the rugged mountainous north. The authorities accuse the rebels of seeking to reinstate the imamate, a form of clerical rule that ended in a republication revolution in 1962, and of being backed by Shiite Iran. But the rebels deny both claims and in turn say that the Sana'a government, which they accuse of aggression and marginalization. Most of Yemen's oil facilities are located in the south. The flare-up of violence there this week, after clashes earlier this year, coincides with a war in Yemen's far north between the army and insurgents of the Zaydi Shiite sect since early August.
