Haji Aliyu, a resident of Mafraq who described himself as a journalist working for Al Jazeera, said that the armed group was still holding the wounded.

“They told us in the morning they were putting us on a bus to Tafsirah. On the way, they shot two protesters in the head and one in the back,” he said.

The violence erupted in several cities throughout the country. In the capital of Sanaa, security fighters killed a dozen people and killed eight while in Shabwa, around 170 km (100 miles) north-east of the capital, dozens were killed and over 100 wounded, local reporters said.

On Friday evening, a security source told Reuters that fighters had fired rockets directly into the presidential compound in Taiz, where a prominent figure in Yemen’s power-sharing government is based. One official later confirmed that it had been so, but said “it was not a military base”.

According to a health ministry official, 24 people, including 14 security bodies, and six police officers were among those killed in that city.

A local al-Jazeera journalist and a former journalist working for a western television channel confirmed that fighters had also killed eight people there.

Reuters could not independently verify the reports, but they are widely believed to be true in Yemen for security reasons. Sanaa has been a target of Houthi incursions since the uprising against Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s predecessor, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Houthi men stand guard as protesters protest over the killing of a member of their family by unidentified assailants near the National Security Service headquarters in Sanaa, November 2, 2015. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

In the northwestern city of Taiz, Reuters journalists gathered in Jeddah where protesters said they had been holding a sit-in for an hour. They said that security forces had fired at protesters inside the country’s premier television station, Al-Mazira.

“We wanted to talk to the security forces about what happened and why they were arresting journalists,” said Mohamed Mohammed, a political activist based in central Taiz.

“The demonstrators attacked us and broke some of our windows. It started without any warning. We have been in there for two hours but they don’t give us any of the information we want,” he added, calling the arrests “illegal with no witnesses, no lawyers and no access