NYR | VICE | THE YEMENI MAN SUING BT FOR AMERICAS DEADLY DRONE ATTACKS British Telecoms (BT) have been providing communications infrastructure vital to America’s targeted killing programme in Yemen. Human rights charity Reprieve claim that providing the technology that allows the US military to launch drone attacks is a breach of their obligations as a multinational company, and one of Reprieves clients, Mohammed al-Qawli – whose brother and cousin both died in a US drone strike in Yemen – is seeking to hold those responsible to account. A deep boom rocked through Sana’a – the sound coming from outside of the city, perhaps from near the village of al-Masnaa. Mohammed al-Qawli, who works at Yemen’s Ministry of Education, was at home with some of his colleagues. Checking in on what exactly had happened, he phoned someone he knew who lived in the village. The man on the other end of the phone read out the number plate of a car that had been hit; it belonged to Mohammed’s family. Putting down the phone, he immediately made the 20-minute drive out to the bomb site. Mohammed’s cousin, 20-year-old university student Salim al-Qawli, ran an informal taxi service to supplement his familys income; a common practice if you happen to own a vehicle in Yemen. He was approached by two men who wanted to be driven out of the village and – understandably, given it was his job – agreed. Ali al-Qawli, Salim’s relative and a local primary school teacher, went along for the ride. While driving towards their destination, they were stopped at a military checkpoint. Then, just before 9PM, a Hellfire missile tore its way through the sky and struck the vehicle. Everyone in the car died instantly. Usually with footage of drone strikes, a target sits in the centre of a screen, a white flash erupts and, once it fades, nothing is left behind. The process is quick and clean. But this isn’t what it’s like on the ground. With the car still on fire, local villagers had gathered around the remains of the pick-up truck. “The smell of burning flesh was overwhelming,” Mohammed says. “The bodies were in pieces.” Four bodies were “burned right through”, according to a criminal investigations officer who arrived at the site shortly after the strike. “We had to go to a nearby village to get water to put the fire out,” Mohammed said, telling me he spent the next several hours trying to collect his relatives’ body parts. “The memory remains etched in my mind and haunts me to this day.” Read More: vice/en_uk/read/the-yemeni-man-suing-bt-for-american-drone-strikes
Posted on: Tue, 27 May 2014 22:23:38 +0000
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