Fears over ‘non-believer’ student killing

A GUNMAN paused for a moment after entering an internet cafe in the Yemeni port city of Aden, approached Amgad Abdulrahman and pulled the trigger three times.

As the 22-year-old law student – a member of a cultural club set up by secularists – lay dying, the gunman retreated outside. No group has claimed responsibility for the May 14 killing in the Sheikh Othman neighbourhood.

Friends suspect Abdulrahman was shot dead by Islamist militants who they say are waging a campaign of persecution against secularists accused of promoting an anti-Islam message or being atheists.

Some residents fear the killing has taken the persecution to a new level, nearly two years after local fighters backed by a Saudi-led coalition drove Iran-aligned Houthi forces out of the southern city.

Soldiers from a local security force comprising Salafist Islamists prevented the body being buried in the city cemetery.

“They said he was not a Muslim,” said a friend of Abdulrahman. “His family had to take him to another cemetery far away from the city.”

Yemen has been torn apart by the civil war pitting the Houthis against the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by the Saudi-led alliance.

Abdulrahman was a member of a cultural club set up by secular students and intellectuals last year and quickly came under pressure for broaching taboo subjects in public debates.

A few weeks before he was killed, Abdulrahman had helped moderate a debate hosted by the club known as al-Nassiya, on “the conditions of Adeni woman” in recent generations.

The debates proved divisive in Aden, once the cosmopolitan capital of the Marxist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, a country that merged with more traditional north Yemen in 1990.

Abdulrahman had been detained at a military base and accused of being an atheist last December. He was freed days later, but friends say the incident convinced the family to suppress their grievances.

Another member of the club, Mohammed Ali, said someone had also tried to kill him on December 29 last year. He now lives abroad.

“It started when imams in Aden mosques talked about us publicly, called us infidels and accused us of spreading atheism,” said Ali.

Others were jailed, according to a statement issued by the club after Abdulrahman’s killing, and some residents fear religious extremists have infiltrated the southern security forces to destabilise Aden.

Ali said he had received threats via social media and phone calls after publishing a book on Islam and science, in which he sought to argue that some assertions in the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book, were “scientifically wrong”.

“In a dark street, a man came out of a car and shot at me twice,” said Ali. “I still don’t know how he missed me.” – Reuters