Tens of thousands of supporters and opponents of Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh held rival demonstrations in the capital today, in a test of support for the veteran leader's 32-year rule.
Protesters outside Sanaa University, repeating slogans which have echoed round the Arab world since the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, chanted: "The people demand the downfall of the regime."
One person was killed in the southern Yemeni city of Aden when more than 10,000 people took to the streets demanding that Saleh step down.
"The body of a 20-year-old man was taken to the hospital after he was shot in the head," a medical source in Aden's Mualla district said.
At least 25 people were wounded, mostly by live bullets, in the demonstrations that started after Friday prayers, witnesses said. One of the wounded people was in critical condition.
Security forces set up checkpoints on roads leading to the seaport city to prevent demonstrators from neighbouring cities from joining protests in Aden, while armoured vehicles were stationed at the city's main intersections.
In Sanaa, loyalists shouted support for a leader they said was holding the fractured and impoverished tribal country together. "The creator of unity is in our hearts. We will not abandon him," they chanted.
Seventeen people have died in the past nine days in a sustained wave of nationwide anti-Saleh protests galvanised by the fall of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents. Mr Saleh has said he will not give in to "anarchy and killing".
A US ally against the Yemen-based al-Qaeda wing that has launched attacks at home and abroad, the Yemeni leader is struggling to end protests flaring across the Arabian Peninsula's poorest state.
He is also trying to maintain a shaky truce with northern Shia Muslim rebels and contain a secessionist insurgency in the south against northern rule.
In the city of Taiz, 200km south of the capital, about 10,000 people staged an anti-government protest.
Reuters