Up to 29 people were killed in tribal and sectarian clashes in Yemen in the past 24 hours, police officials said on Wednesday.

Clashes between two powerful tribes over a land dispute broke out on Tuesday, killing 17 people and injuring 40 others, local police officials in Marib told Xinhua by phone.

The fighting between Al-Abu Tahif tribe in the central province of Marib and Bal-Harith tribe in the southeastern province of Shabwa began on Tuesday and intensified overnight as the two sides refused to give up their control of a land in the desert on the shared borders between them, police officials said.

In the capital Sanaa, businessman Mohammed al-Habbari, who supported the Shiite Houthi rebels, and eight of his bodyguards were killed on Tuesday night in Hassaba neighborhood over sectarian conflicts in the Sunni-dominated Arhab district, about 40 km northeast of Sanaa, police said.

On the same day, three people were killed and six others wounded in downtown Sanaa in a tribal clash between two families over a land dispute, the police said.

The improvised Arab country, already awash of roughly 60 million pieces of weapons, is struggling to maintain stability after a year-long upheaval forced former President Ali Abdullah Saleh out of power in 2012.

The government tried to resolve a Shiite rebellion in the north and a growing secessionist movement in the south, as well as to combat an active regional network of the al-Qaida wing which is based in the country's southeastern region.

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