AL-MUKALLA: Two Yemenis kidnapped by the Houthis died after being brutally tortured inside militia prisons, Yemeni human rights advocates and local media said on Saturday. 

The deaths have sparked outrage, with demands for an inquiry to bring the killers to justice, and an acceleration of prisoner-exchange negotiations.

One of the victims, Munaser Al-Rasas, a Yemeni expatriate working in Saudi Arabia, is believed to have been abducted while returning to his family home in the central province of Al-Bayda to celebrate Eid Al-Adha last July.

TEHRAN: Iran’s judiciary is to rule by Friday on whether to release celebrated filmmaker Jafar Panahi on bail after his conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, his lawyer said on Saturday.
Panahi, 62, who has won a string of awards at European film festivals, was arrested on July 11 and had been due to serve a six-year sentence handed down in 2010 after his conviction for “propaganda against the system.”
But on Oct. 15, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction and ordered a retrial.

TUNIS: Plainclothes security officers in Tunisia detained a prominent critic of President Kais Saied in the early hours of Saturday after a military court ruling, his lawyer said.
Seifeddine Makhlouf had been found guilty of insulting police during a standoff at Tunis airport in March 2021.
Makhlouf, head of Islamist nationalist party Al-Karama, shouted “down with the coup” and “long live Tunisia” before being bundled into a car, according to a Facebook video posted by the lawyer.

LONDON: Reports from Iran suggest authorities are set to clamp down on the city of Zahedan, the site of assaults on protesters in 2022 that left multiple people dead or injured.
Sixty-six people are known to have died after security forces opened fire on demonstrators on Sept. 30, a day subsequently known as “Bloody Friday,” at a march to protest the death earlier that month of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini while in the custody of the country’s morality police for not wearing her hijab correctly.

BAB AL-HAWA: The first batch of cholera vaccines reached opposition-held areas in the northwest of war-ravaged Syria, where the extremely virulent disease is spreading.
Syria’s first outbreak since 2009, which the UN and local officials say has killed dozens of people since August, has been attributed in part to dilapidated infrastructure after more than a decade of conflict.
Two trucks loaded with vaccines entered Syria’s Idlib province through the Bab Al-Hawa crossing, linking Turkiye with areas under extremists’ control, an AFP correspondent said.