Some armed men who opened fire into the air to disperse the crowd that was in the courtyard of a school in the historic center of Santo receive a check for just eight dollarss caused the stampede that has left at least 78 dead and dozens of wounded.

The tragedy, one of the worst in Yemen unrelated to the ongoing conflict, took place at a government school in the smuggler-controlled old city of Sanaa. Shia Houthi rebelsin which they were distributing coupons of 5,000 Yemeni riyals, around eight dollars in the parallel market, at an event organized by a prominent businessman, identified as Mohamed al Kaboos, according to the same sources.

The crowd was jammed in the courtyard of the Al Maeen School when the gunmen fired into the air to disperse the people, causing them to try to flee through the school gate and causing the stampede, said the witnesses, who asked not to be called. identified. The Al Masira network, a spokesperson for the Houthis, published a video showing a trapped marabunta among the people who press to leave at the entrances of the school, where there are some stairs.

The Houthi Ministry of Health reported that the balance of victims is 78 dead and 139 woundedyes, between them 13 very serious and 62 who suffered minor injuries. The Houthi Interior Ministry spokesman, General Abdul Khaliq al Ajri, considered what happened tonight in the capital as a “tragic and painful accident in which dozens of people died as a result of a stampede of citizens during the random distribution of sums of money from some merchants without coordination with the Interior Ministry,” the insurgents’ Yemeni news agency Saba reported.

The head of the Houthi ministry indicated that two of the responsible traders of this distribution were detained, without identifying them, while the prosecutor’s office immediately mobilized to investigate what happened. The Yemeni capital is controlled by rebels backed by Iran since 2014, when a conflict began that forced the internationally recognized Yemeni government into exile in Aden, in the south of the country.

The war in Yemen, in which Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 as the leader of a military coalition, has caused the worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.