Local sources and residents said that at least three people were killed and a fourth was injured on Sunday when a part of a historic and archaeological mosque collapsed in the Old City of Sana’a during a restoration process.
Sources told Reuters that the incident occurred while engineers and workers from the Historical Cities Authority were performing maintenance and restoration work around a “historic water well” at the Dome of the Mahdi archaeological mosque in the Old City of Sana’a.
Abdullah Al-Kabsi, the Minister of Culture in the internationally unrecognized Houthi government, stated during his visit to the site of the incident that, according to the engineers present at the site, the collapse occurred while workers were installing sensors and conducting excavations as part of the site’s restoration, resulting in the death of three workers and severe injuries to a fourth.
The Dome of the Mahdi is one of the historic mosques in the Old City of Sana’a, located in the Mahdi Dome Alley in the western Siraa neighborhood. It was built in 1164 AH by order of Imam Al-Mahdi Abbas bin Al-Mansur, who was buried there after his death in 1189.
The Old City of Sana’a is one of the oldest Arab cities, with a history spanning thousands of years according to historians. Its religious and political heritage is manifested in the architecture of 103 mosques, 14 baths, and more than six thousand houses, all built before the eleventh century, and it was inscribed on the World Heritage List by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1986.
However, in 2015, the organization approved placing the city, along with the historical cities of Shibam Hadramout and Zabid, on the List of World Heritage in Danger due to the decline in national efforts to preserve these cities. This step is usually taken as a precursor to removing any city from the World Heritage List if national authorities fail to stop violations.
These historical cities have been heavily affected in recent times due to the increasing challenges of climate change.
