SANAA // Saudi-led air strikes on a security complex in central Yemen controlled by Shiite rebels killed 11 people on Sunday.
A first strike on the complex in the Ibb province town of Al Qaeda caused no casualties but a second strike hit as guards were evacuating some 300 detainees, witnesses and medics said.
Fifty people were wounded.
A Saudi-led coalition has conducted air strikes on rebel positions across Yemen since March and has provided training and heavy weapons to forces seeking to reinstate exiled President Abdrabu Mansur Hadi.
Raids on the rebel-held capital killed 15 people on Friday.
The rebels still control Sanaa a year after they overran it with support from renegade troops still loyal to Hadi’s ousted predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh.
But they have lost territory in the south since late July when the coalition began deploying ground troops in support of the exiled president’s loyalists.
The United Nations says nearly 4,900 people have been killed in Yemen since late March. The UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien has called the scale of suffering “almost incomprehensible”.
Meanwhile, Yemeni officials and Houthi rebels in Sanaa say six foreign hostages have been released after being held in the city for more than five months.
The officials say the hostages are three Americans, two Saudis and a British national. The six boarded a plane on Sunday and were flying to Oman, which negotiated their release.
Houthi officials refused to give the reasons for the detention of the hostages. But at least one of them is a journalist, whom they said “entered the country illegally” and “worked without notifying the authorities”.
* Agence France-Presse, additional reporting from Associated Press
