SANAA, Jan 1, (Agencies): Yemeni police fired teargas to disperse a demonstration by separatists near the southern city of Aden on Friday wounding four people, one of the protestors told AFP.
“One of those wounded had his leg amputated,” the activist who declined to be named told AFP, adding that the protest took place in the western Salaheddin suburb.
Several hundred people took part in the protest after the main weekly Muslim prayers and demonstrators were calling for the release of south Yemeni separatist activists arrested by the authorities in recent rallies.
Separatists want to end the union between north and south Yemen which was proclaimed in 1990 and reinforced in a 1994 civil war.
Separatist sentiment has grown in recent years with southerners complaining of discrimination and underinvestment by the Sanaa government.
Several protests in recent months have sparked bloody clashes with the security forces during which an unknown number of people have been rounded up.

Yemen’s Shiite rebels said yesterday they were ready for talks to end fighting with neighbouring Saudi Arabia, and issued a taped message from their leader to disprove reports he had been killed.
Meanwhile, Yemen said an al-Qaeda figure who had made a rare public appearance at a rally to threaten the United States was among militants killed in a Dec 24 air raid on the group.
Yemen has come under the spotlight after the regional wing of al-Qaeda there said it was behind the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US passenger plane.
The United States and Saudi Arabia fear al-Qaeda will exploit instability in Yemen, which faces a northern Shiite revolt and separatist sentiment in the south, to turn it into a launchpad for attacks.
“If Saudi aggression stops and there is a real will towards security and stability ... then we do not attack anyone that does not attack us,” the rebels said on their website.
“We reiterate ... our support for dialogue and a language of understanding to resolve all differences,” said the rebels, who are also fighting government troops in Yemen’s mountainous north.
Saudi Arabia began launching strikes on the rebels after they seized a pocket of Saudi territory last month.

The rebels posted on the Internet an audio recording from their leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, in an effort to deny Yemeni government and media reports that he had been killed in the war.
“Our fighters have the necessary experience (of war) ... but we are concerned about our innocent civilians ... our women and children,” Houthi said in the tape, urging global condemnation of what he said were killings of many civilians in the war.
The authenticity of the tape could not be verified, but the speakerís voice sounded like that in earlier Houthi recordings.
The recording appeared to be new as Houthi referred to government and Saudi air attacks he said had been carried out against civilian targets as recently as Dec 27.
But Yemen’s national security chief Ali Mohammad al-Ansi cast doubt on the message, insisting that “indications suggest (Houthi) is dead”, a defence ministry website said.
Mohammed Saleh al-Omair, seen on Al Jazeera television threatening attacks on the United States at an opposition rally this month, was among five of the dead militants identified after the Dec 24 air raids, the website said.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has said the failed Christmas Day plane attack over Detroit, for which a Nigerian man has been charged, was meant to avenge raids on Dec 17 on the group, which it blamed on the United States.
A suspected al-Qaeda militant was arrested in Arhab, an area near the capital Sanaa which was also hit in the Dec 17 raids, the website added.
In southern Yemen, hundreds of supporters of the opposition Southern Movement marched yesterday to demand the release of those arrested in earlier protests, residents and websites said.
Both the Shiite rebels and the southern separatists complain of social and economic discrimination, which the government denies.