A protester was killed and at least four were injured in clashes between police and disgruntled youths demanding army jobs in southern Yemen Wednesday, local sources and witnesses said. The sources said anti-riot police clashed with dozens of protesters trying to storm into government buildings in the southern city of al-Habileen. Five protesters were injured, and one of them died later at the hospital. Protesters also set to fire a branch of the ruling General People's Congress (GPC) party in the neighbouring town of Tour al- Baha, witnesses said. An Interior Ministry source, quoted by the official Saba news agency, denied the reported death of a protester and said those involved in the riots were "outlawed saboteurs." "Those outlawed saboteurs attacked several innocent (government) employees and ransacked stores as well as private and public properties in Tour al-Baha," said the unnamed source. Residents said army and police forces closed a highway linking the capital Sana'a with the south's biggest city of Aden and passes through the violence-hit cities. Violent protests, led by young men complaining about what they called discriminatory policies in an army recruitment programme, erupted in several southern cities on Tuesday. Police arrested dozens of southern opposition leaders on Tuesday, saying they backed the violent demonstrations, opposition sources said. The clashes were the latest in a series of confrontations between police and southerners staging protests. In the last three months of 2007, at least 16 people were killed and dozens injured in similar violent clashes. The violence highlight the increasing tensions between southern and northern Yemen nearly 14 years after a civil war that ended with the defeat of the southern military by northern forces. North and South Yemen were united in 1990. In 1994, southern leaders announced the secession of the south, and battled northern forces led by President Ali Abdullah Saleh for ten weeks in a civil war that ended in their defeat. In the aftermath of the war, Saleh announced a general amnesty, which applied to nearly 8,000 southerners who left the country after the war. Most of the breakaway politicians who led the secession attempt were leaders of the communist Yemeni Socialist Party that ruled Southern Yemen for nearly 20 years, and shared authority with Saleh's GPC party in a unity government after 1990.
