Houthis release 6 foreign hostages

Yemen's Houthi have released six foreign hostages, including three Americans, two Saudis and a Briton, Yemeni officials have said on Saturday. 

According to the AP news agency, the hostages were captured several months ago.

The six were expected to leave the country on board an Omani plane carrying rebel officials to Muscat for talks with the UN envoy to Yemen, the sources said.

Officials from the Houthi media centre refused to explain why they had detained the hostages. 

At least one of them is a journalist, whom they said "entered the country illegally" and "worked without notifying the authorities".

Houthi militias, that are fighting government troops assisted by a Saudi-led coalition, have seized much of Yemen, including the capital Sanaa. However, they have been on the retreat since July and have now been booted out of almost all of South Yemen. An analysts widely expect that the coalition and its supporters on the ground are now preparing to try and retake the capital. 

Meanwhile, in the western province of Ibb, Saudi-led air strikes on a security complex controlled by the Houthis killed 11 people on Sunday.

Witnesses and medics said that some of those who were killed were prisoners. Fifty people were wounded, they said. 

A first strike on the complex caused no casualties but a second strike hit as guards were evacuating some 300 detainees, the sources said.

The casualties on Sunday come after particularly heavy bombing rocked the capital overnight on Friday and Saturday. 

The United Nations says nearly 4,900 people - including at least 2,110 civilians - have been killed in Yemen since late March. UN aid chief Stephen O'Brien has called the scale of suffering "almost incomprehensible".