Last update - 00:00 29/01/2007
Yemenite police protect local Jews from wrath of Islamist threats
By Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent and Reuters
A Yemenite government official has said Monday that authorities will protect members of the local Jewish community under threat from Muslim militants.
Nearly a quarter of Yemen's Jews have fled their village and sought refuge at a hotel in the Arab country after militant Islamists threatened to kill them for selling alcohol, a government official said on Monday.
The official, who asked not to be named, said authorities had deployed policemen around the hotel to protect the Jews, numbering at least 45, after they escaped the village of Al Salem in the northern province of Saada two weeks ago.
"We are protecting them. They are in a safe place," the official added.
The report came as the Yemenite President on Monday warned Islamist Shi'ite militants who killed six soldiers to surrender their weapons or face a showdown with security forces.
The Jews moved into the hotel last week in the wake of a threat message - attributed to disciples of Shiite-inclined religious leader Hossein Bader a-Din al-Khouty - which said that the Jews are acting in a manner that "primarily serves global Zionism, which is acting persistently to disseminate decay amongst the people and to cut them off from their principles, values, their morals and religion."
"There is a special force ready to uproot them if they do not disband and put down their weapons as soon as possible. This operation would not take long," President Ali Abdullah Saleh said at an army event in the capital, Sanaa.
"The Shi'ite militants of (Abdel-Malik) al-Houthi sent threats to them (Jews) because they sell wine," the official told Reuters. The Jewish community denied they sold wine.
"After two weeks, we are still in the hotel. It is the shelter that the government provided for us after we were threatened by Houthi," Jewish cleric David Merhavi told Reuters by telephone.
"We do not sell wine, this is only propaganda," Merhavi said.
Islam forbids the sale or drinking of alcohol.