BBC sees UAE-run secret prisons

BBC given access to detention facilities at former United Arab Emirates military bases in Yemen; This confirmed long-standing allegations about a network of secret prisons run by the UAE and its allied forces in Yemen’s decade-long civil war.

A former detainee told the BBC he was beaten and sexually abused in one of these areas.

At two bases in the south of the country, we saw cells that apparently included shipping containers with detainees’ names and dates engraved on the sides.

The UAE did not respond to our request for comment but has previously denied similar claims.

Until recently, Yemen’s government, backed by Saudi Arabia, was allied with the UAE against the Houthi rebel movement that controls northwestern Yemen.

But the alliance between Yemen’s two Gulf state partners has disintegrated. UAE forces withdrew from Yemen in early January, and Yemeni government forces and their affiliates retook large areas of the south from UAE-backed separatists.

This included the port of Mukalla, where we landed on a Saudi military plane and were taken to visit former UAE military bases in the Al-Dhaba Oil Export Region.

It has become almost impossible for international journalists to obtain visas to report from Yemen in recent years, but the government invited journalists to inspect the two sites, accompanied by Yemeni Information Minister Muammar al-Eryani.

What we saw was consistent with information we had independently collected, both in our previous reports and in interviews conducted separately from the government-led field visit to Yemen.

In one area there were about 10 shipping containers with black interiors and poor ventilation.

Messages appeared on the walls stating the dates detainees said they were brought in or the number of days they had been detained.

Many were dated as recently as December 2025.

At another military base the BBC was shown eight cells built of brick and cement; Several of these were about one meter square and two meters high, and Eryani said they were used for solitary confinement.

Human rights groups have documented testimonies describing such facilities for years.

Yemeni lawyer Huda al-Sarari collects the accounts.

The BBC independently attended the meeting attended by families of approximately 70 people who said they were being held in Mukalla, as well as 30 people whose relatives said they were still in custody.

Some former detainees told us that each shipping container could hold 60 people at a time.

They said the prisoners were blindfolded, their wrists were tied and they were forced to sit upright at all hours.

“There was nowhere to sleep,” one former prisoner told the BBC. “If someone collapsed, the others had to pick him up.”

The man also told the BBC that he was beaten for three days after his arrest, with interrogators demanding he confess to being a member of Al Qaeda, a charge he denied.

“They told me that if I didn’t confess to this, I would be sent to ‘Guantanamo,'” he said, referring to the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I didn’t even know what Guantanamo meant until they took me to their prison. Then I understood.”

He said he was kept there for a year and a half, beaten and abused every day.

“They didn’t even feed us properly,” he said. “They took you once if you wanted to go to the toilet. Sometimes you would be so desperate that you would do it on your own.”

He says that among those who kidnapped him were Yemeni warriors as well as Emirati soldiers: “All kinds of torture; it was the worst when we were interrogated. They even sexually harassed us and said they would bring the ‘doctor’.”

“This so-called doctor was an Emirati citizen. He beat us and told Yemeni soldiers to beat us too. I tried to kill myself many times to stop this.”

The UAE has been waging a counterterrorism campaign in southern Yemen, but human rights groups say thousands of people have been detained in a crackdown on political activists and critics.

One mother told us that her son was detained as a teenager and had been detained for nine years.

“My son was an athlete,” he said. “He had just returned from competitions abroad. He went to the gym that day and never came back.”

“I haven’t heard from him in seven months,” he said.

“Then they let me see him for 10 minutes. I could see all the signs of torture.”

She alleged that her teenage son was electrocuted, doused with ice-cold water and sexually abused multiple times in the Emirati-run base’s prison.

She said she attended a hearing where her son’s accusers played a recording in which he apparently confessed.

“You can hear him being beaten in the background and being told what to say,” he said. “My son is not a terrorist. You stole the best years of his life.”

Over the past decade, human rights groups and media outlets, including the BBC and the Associated Press, have documented allegations of arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, and torture in detention centers run by the UAE and its allies.

Human Rights Watch said it collected statements in 2017 from detainees who were held in unofficial facilities without charge or judicial review and were subjected to beatings, electric shocks and other ill-treatment.

The UAE denied these allegations when made.

The BBC sent detailed allegations to the UAE government about the detention centers we visited and allegations of abuse but received no response.

All parties have been accused of human rights violations in the civil war, which has led to a devastating humanitarian crisis in the country.

Families of the detainees told the BBC they had repeatedly voiced their concerns to Yemeni authorities.

They believe it would be impossible for the UAE and its allies to run a detention network without the Yemeni government and its Saudi backers knowing.

Minister of Information Eryani said: “So far, we have not been able to access places under UAE control.

“We discovered these prisons when we liberated them… many victims had told us they existed, but we did not believe it was true.”

His government’s decision to grant access to international media comes at a time when the gap between Saudi Arabia and the UAE is widening.

Their long-tense relations worsened in December when UAE-backed southern separatists seized areas controlled by government forces in two western provinces of the Southern Transitional Council (STC).

Saudi Arabia then launched an attack on what it said was an arms shipment from the UAE to the STC in Mukalla, and backed the Yemen presidential council’s demand for Emirati forces to leave the country immediately.

The UAE withdrew, and within days government forces and their allies regained control of the western provinces as well as the entire south.

But remaining separatists threaten the government’s position in some places, including the southern port of Aden.

The UAE denied that the shipment contained weapons and also denied Saudi claims that it was behind the STC’s latest military action.

On January 12, 2026, Rashad al-Alimi, head of the Yemeni Presidential Leadership Council, which oversees the government, ordered the closure of all “illegal” prisons in the southern provinces previously controlled by the STC and demanded the immediate release of those “held outside the framework of the law”.

Eryani said that there were some detainees in the facilities, but did not give the number or detailed information.

Some relatives, including the athlete’s mother, told the BBC that the detainees were transferred to prisons that are now nominally under government control.

Yemeni authorities say transferring prisoners to the official justice system is complex, while human rights groups warn that arbitrary detentions could continue under different controls.

“Terrorists are on the streets,” the mother said.

“Our sons are not terrorists.”