News - Yemen: The head of the National Delegation said Friday that the United Nations and its envoy should not believe Saudi propaganda and whitewash it, especially on issues that have become clear and cause for ridicule.

“The UN envoy should play his role responsibly and impartially, taking stands in favor of the aggressor will only lead him to lose like his predecessors," Mohammed Abdulsalam added.

This comes as a comment on the UN’s welcome for the alleged Riyadh initiative regarding prisoners.

Earlier on Friday, The National Committee for Prisoners Affairs revealed the fallacy of announced Riyadh’s initiative, it confirmed that after the Saudi regime announced the release of 163 prisoners from the Army and Popular Committees, contact was made with the International Committee of the Red Cross to make the necessary arrangements in this regard.

"After three days of the announcement, we met with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, after their visit to the detainees, which were 126 detainees only, and not 163 as announced by the Saudi regime" The committee said in a statement.

The statement added, "We received the names lists from them, matched them with our database of prisoners, and we found that all detainees are not prisoners of war, except for only five of them and four fishermen who were kidnapped from the Red Sea."

It continued, "Although we welcome the release of any Yemeni, they must coordinate with the concerned authorities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates and the Ministry of Human Rights."

The statement clarified that among the detainees are nine foreigners of African nationalities with whom we have no connection, stressing that the National Committee for Prisoners' Affairs is concerned with following up and liberating all prisoners of the Yemeni Army and Committees.

The Prisoners’ Committee had announced late March the agreement with the US-Saudi aggression on a prisoner exchange deal through the UN to release 1,400 prisoners of the Army and Popular Committees, in return for 823 from the other side. The agreement incoulds 16 Saudi prisoners and three Sudanese, in addition to Nasser Mansour Hadi and Mahmoud Al-Subaihi. However, the other party is still procrastinating without implementing what was agreed upon.

More than a year has passed since the implementation of the only prisoner exchange deal under the auspices of the United Nations. After that it was unable to implement any new deal due to the obstruction of the US-Saudi aggression and its mercenaries from implementing the rest of the signed agreements, in addition to the clear UN inability to move this humanitarian issue.

In the face of the obstacles that the aggression places in the way of implementing prisoner exchange agreements, including those carried out under the auspices of the United Nations, the Prisoners’ Affairs Committee seeks exchanges through local mediation, but the aggression is trying to close this door as well.

The mercenaries of the aggression had received strict Saudi directives to prevent local exchanges since March 2021, and as a result, the National Committee for Prisoners' Affairs was only able to carry out some individual exchanges.

A Saudi-led coalition, which receives arms and intelligence from Western countries, waged war against Yemen in March 2015 to restore power to the country’s Riyadh-friendly former officials. The war and a simultaneous siege that the US-Saudi-led coalition has been enforcing on the country has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis.