Details of the agreement for the release of Mohammed Qahtan as part of prisoner exchange deals
Exclusive Follow-up / Masaa Press:
A spokesman for the Prisoners’ Delegation affiliated with the coalition announced that the Sana’a delegation agreed that Mohammed Qahtan would be part of the upcoming prisoner exchange operations.
Majid Fadhael, the coalition spokesman, appears to have forgotten that he had previously told the French news agency AFP that the negotiations had finished without any significant progress.
The head of Sana’a’s negotiating delegation, Abdul Qader Al-Murtada, confirmed what AFP reported about Fadhael in a statement to Al-Mayadeen TV. He also confirmed that the talks had not advanced and had been postponed until after Eid, and that the agreement between the two sides was limited to increasing the number of prisoners for the upcoming deal.
Fadhael’s remark about Mohammed Qahtan has not received an official reaction from Sana’a, but some observers think that it was a deception intended to implicate the government of Sana’a and then claiming that they had reneged on the agreement to release him.
In the previous Ramadan, the Sana’a government had affirmed that it was prepared to disclose Mohammed Qahtan’s fate in exchange for the other party disclosing the fate of the inmates affiliated with it.