Sanaa - The UN envoy for Yemen on Saturday launched a mission to discuss stalled Geneva peace talks as Saudi-led coalition warplanes pounded rebel positions across the war-ravaged country.
In the southern province of Abyan, a car bomb blast killed 12 rebels and wounded eight others, a local official said.
Coalition warplanes launched deadly air strikes against rebel positions in the southern city of Aden, a military official said, without giving figures.
But 48 hours of fighting there and rebel shelling with mortar rounds and Katyusha rockets killed nine people and wounded 132 others, a health official and a spokesman of anti-rebel forces in the port city said.
UN special envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who flew in to Sanaa on Friday, said "all Yemeni parties must return to dialogue," quoted by the rebel-held sabanews.net.
A member of ousted president Ali Abdullah Saleh's General People's Congress told AFP the Mauritanian diplomat met Saturday with "senior leaders" of the party for talks on the Geneva conference.
But the source said the envoy did not meet with Saleh himself, who lashed out at Saudi Arabia in an interview with a Beirut-based television channel broadcast on Friday.
AFP
