On 14 May 2014, Alkarama submitted an urgent appeal to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention as well as other Special Procedures for the immediate release of Mr Al Masraba who had been under enforced disappearance for more than thirty-three years. Alkarama requested also the intervention of the Working Group to ensure that the Yemeni authorities immediately release all the victims of enforced disappearance since the 1980s and address this serious and systematic violation.
Last year, following the receiving of unconfirmed information that Mr Al Masraba may be still alive, Alkarama submitted a communication on his case to the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance.
Mr Al Masraba was arrested during the civil war opposing Marxist guerrillas to the government of northern Yemen.
As a consequence of this war, a systematic practice of enforced disappearance was undertaken by northern Yemen security forces against its opponents as of the early 1970s. This practice continued until 1990, when Yemen was re-unified. Most of the people arrested during this period remain today detained or disappeared.
In December 2012, a detainee named Mr Al Iryani was released from Belad Arrous prison after 27 years of secret detention. Despite his inability to provide information about his detention or his former co-detainees due to the deterioration of his physical and mental health, this reappearance renewed hope of the families of disappeared persons to find their relatives alive.
For years, Mr Al Masraba's family has been trying to locate him or at least to obtain information on his whereabouts. They negotiated unofficially with officers in the political security apparatus but all the steps taken were unsuccessful until 17 April 2014.
A few weeks ago, Rashid, the son of Mr Al Masraba was finally able to obtain a visit to his father by an officer of the political security who accepted to help him. On 17 April, the victim's son met with the officer Mr Mohamed Al 'Areej who brought him by car, blindfolded, to a secrete prison in the neighbourhood of Sana'a. When he arrived there, Mr Al Masraba's son was taken to the building's basement where he met his father after thirty-three years of disappearance.
Following this short visit, the officer promised him to "release" Mr Al Masraba and leave him in the psychiatric hospital of Al Hudaydah. In fact, it seems that pretending that he had been interned in a psychiatric hospital all these years is a way for the authorities to avoid admitting that Mr Al Masraba was in fact detained in the Political Security secret prisons.
On 21 April 2014, Mr Rashid Al Masraba went to Al Hudaydah's psychiatric hospital, as planned, but did not find his father there. He reiterated his visit several times and requested the political security officials to release his father but this was denied to him. The same day Mr Al 'Areej was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in Sana'a.
Those elements as well as the critical physical and mental health condition of Mr Al Iryani when released constitute an additional reason to believe that Mr Al Masraba and other detainees in his case are at grave risk of death or harm to their physical and mental integrity in order to prevent them from revealing the truth about the authorities' practice of enforced disappearance and the reality of the secret prisons of the political security apparatus.