Yemen police use tasers on protesters, says rights group

Yemeni security forces used electric tasers and batons Sunday to attack young protesters who had gathered for a third day in anti-government demonstrators, claimed a prominent rights group.

"Without provocation, government security forces brutally beat and tasered peaceful demonstrators on the streets of Sanaa," according to Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

"The government needs to take full responsibility for this abuse."

Several thousand protesters gathered on Sunday and tried to reach a central square in the capital Sanaa, but security forces beat them back, Al Jazeera English reports.

Protesters in Yemen, the Arab world's poorest country, are demanding political reforms and the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The protests were the largest yet by young Yemenis and were mostly organized via text messages. Established opposition groups who had organized earlier protests did not join these.

"Unlike the earlier protests in Yemen, which were highly organized and marked by color-coordinated clothing and signs, the spontaneity of the younger demonstrators appeared to have more in common with popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where opposition groups watched from the sidelines as leaderless revolts grew into revolutions," reports The New York Times.

Protests and demonstrations spread across the Arab world this weekend following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt on Friday. In addition to Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain and Jordan saw new protests as well as clashes with security forces.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority dismissed its cabinet and called for new elections.

And in Iran, political opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi issued a statement supporting new protests in the country.

"Mubarak's Friday-night resignation appeared to boost momentum for opposition forces around the region and raise the stakes for regimes trying to head them off," reports the Wall Street Journal.

Follow GlobalPost on Twitter: @GlobalPost