Raymah Court Fines 4 Men for Volunteer Road-Paving

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AL-JABIN, Yemen — A court in Yemen’s Raymah governorate has fined four men who helped pave a mountain road, ruling that the stones they used were state property.

The Court of First Instance in Al-Jabin, the governorate capital, convicted Mohammed Qasim Abdo al-Qulaisi, Mahmoud Ali Abdullah Qaid, Mohammed Ali Ibrahim al-Ayashi and Mohammed Ali Mohammed al-Harazi, according to the text of the ruling as reported by the Yemeni news sites Sada al-Sahel and al-Sahil.

Judge Abdullah Mohammed Ali al-Ahdal issued the decision, both outlets said.

The four had taken part in a volunteer effort to surface a track serving Bani al-Harazi, a sub-district of Al-Jabin, the reports said.

The court found they had cut stone from an uninhabited mountainside without an official permit.

Residents maintain the stone came from unused ground and that the work served a public road, both outlets said.

It held that the stone belonged to the state, and that using it without a licence amounted to an encroachment on public property, Sada al-Sahel reported.

Each man was fined 50,000 riyals in what the reports call the old currency.

The four were also made jointly liable for the value of roughly 15,000 stones used in the paving.

They were ordered to pay a further 400,000 riyals in litigation costs to the plaintiff, the governorate office of the land and real estate tax authority, Sada al-Sahel said.

The outlet named the head of that office as Abdulrahman al-Jallah and described him as a Houthi official.

Accounts of the valuation differ. Sada al-Sahel, citing local residents, said a committee sent to the road priced the stone at about 8 million riyals. Al-Sahil put the figure at about 9 million.

Sada al-Sahel said residents described pressure on the four to pay the assessed value of the stone.

Neither report says when the ruling was issued.

None of the reports says whether the men have appealed, or whether the judgment is final. None says whether any of the money has been paid.

Residents told both outlets the paving was unpaid and locally organised, undertaken because the track was rough and no state or donor project had reached it.

Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni said the men gathered scattered stones from an abandoned site and laid them by hand along the roughest stretches of the track.

Residents were relieved the route became passable, that outlet said.

Al-Sahil, which carried a report from Raymah by its correspondent Mohammed Abdulqawi on 4 September, described al-Qulaisi as a sheikh.

Sada al-Sahel published its account on 3 September, timed at 4:49 p.m. Yemen time.

Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni reported the case separately on 4 September, saying Houthi authorities had filed the complaint against the men. It attributed its account to local sources and did not name them.

That outlet described the four as young men and framed the case with the Arabic proverb about the reward of Sinimmar, used of someone punished for good work.

The three sites characterise the prosecution as an attempt to turn voluntary service work into a source of fines. Sada al-Sahel and al-Sahil both publish from a position critical of the Houthi administration. Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni describes itself as an independent newspaper founded in 2012.

Yemen Herald could not independently verify the ruling or its terms. This account rests on the judgment as described by those outlets. No court or government body has published the text, and the Houthi-run judicial authorities in Raymah have not commented publicly on the case.

Yemen has run a split monetary system since 2016, when authorities in Sanaa barred banknotes printed by the Aden-based central bank from areas under their control. Two versions of the riyal have circulated at different rates since, so a sum stated in old notes is not directly comparable to one quoted in the south.

Raymah lies in Yemen’s western highlands, south-west of Sanaa.

It became a governorate in 2004, having previously been administered as part of neighbouring provinces.

It is among the country’s smallest and most mountainous. Terraced slopes and narrow valleys make road building slow and expensive.

The region had largely been passed over by the government and by donors before that, according to an evaluation by the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The fund financed the Raymah Area Development Project, which built feeder roads, small dams, water-harvesting reservoirs and community drinking-water schemes, the evaluation said.

The assessment was published by the fund’s Independent Office of Evaluation.

It said the project helped open the region to broader development investment and contributed to Raymah becoming a full governorate.

Houthi forces control Raymah, as they do most of the northern highlands.

Territorial control allows the parties to Yemen’s war to administer services and levy taxes in the areas they hold, the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies has written.

The centre has also documented how front lines closed main roads within and between governorates to civilian traffic, lengthening journeys and raising transport costs.

The reports said the case drew wide comment on Yemeni social media in the first week of September.

Bani al-Harazi lies in Al-Jabin district, in the centre of the governorate.

Al-Jabin district takes its name from the town that serves as the governorate seat.