Saudi-led raid on prison kills 60 people in Yemen

Arab coalition warplanes bombed a security complex near the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, killing 60 people including inmates of a prison on the site, a regional official, relatives and medical sources said yesterday.

The prison in the city's al-Zaydiyah district was holding 84 inmates when it was struck three times late on Saturday, Hashem al-Azizi, deputy governor of the Houthi rebel-controlled Hodeidah province of the same name, told Reuters.

Local officials said the site lies within a security complex for the area guarded by Houthi militiamen but that only prison security guards were present during the night-time air strike.

The Saudi-led coalition has been fighting Yemen's armed Houthi movement since March 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognised President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was driven into exile by the Iran-allied group in late 2014.

A Reuters witness at the security complex said the entire building was destroyed and medics pulled about 17 bodies away - many of them missing limbs - while others remained stuck under the rubble.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Rights groups have said the raids may amount to war crimes, but an investigative body set up by the coalition largely defended its methods in an August report which concluded that Houthi rebels regularly deploy to civilian sites.

The bombing may signal a renewed uptick in violence a day after President Hadi rejected a new UN peace proposal to end the turmoil in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country, saying the deal would only be a path to more war and destruction.

Speaking after meeting UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed in Riyadh, Hadi said the agreement would "reward the rebels and penalise the Yemeni people and legitimacy", according to the government-controlled Saba news agency.

According to a copy of the proposal seen by Reuters, the plan would sideline Hadi and set up a government of less divisive figures.