In a recent report by Human Rights Watch, Saudi border guards have been charged with the mass murder of migrants near the Yemeni border.
Reports have shown that hundreds of people, mostly Ethiopians who cross war-torn Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia, have been shot dead.
It was also stated that some Migrants said they had limbs severed by gunfire and bodies left on the trails.
One of them, a 21-year-old Mustafa Soufia Mohammed said some in his group of 45 migrants were killed when they came under fire as they tried to sneak across the border in July last year.
“I didn’t even notice I was shot, but when I tried to get up and walk, part of my leg was not with me.” He said
According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, more than 200,000 people a year attempt a perilous journey, crossing by sea from the Horn of Africa to Yemen and then travelling on to Saudi Arabia.
Human rights organisations say many experience imprisonment and beatings along the way.
“The sea crossing is dangerous enough. More than 24 migrants were reported missing last week after a shipwreck off the coast of Djibouti.” They said
In Yemen, the main migrant routes are littered with the graves of people who have died along the way.
It is hard to determine with certainty how many people have died because of how far away the border crossings are and how challenging it is to find survivors, according to the authors.
Reports of widespread killings perpetrated by Saudi security forces along the northern border first surfaced last October in a letter by UN experts to the government in Riyadh.
In their report, they drew attention to “what appears to be a systematic pattern of large-scale, indiscriminate cross-border killings, using artillery shelling and small arms fired by Saudi security forces against migrants.”
The Saudi government said it took the allegations seriously but however, strongly rejected the UN’s characterisation that the killings were systematic or large-scale.
“Based on the limited information provided, authorities within the Kingdom have discovered no information or evidence to confirm or substantiate the allegations.” the government replied.
But last month, the Mixed Migration Centre, a global research network, published further allegations of killings along the border, based on its own interviews with survivors, containing graphic descriptions of rotting corpses scattered throughout the border area, captured migrants being asked by Saudi border guards which leg they want to be shot through, and machine guns and mortars being used to attack large groups of terrified people.
Chioma Kalu
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