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An international rights group is calling for an investigation into alleged disappearances, torture and likely deaths in prisons and "network of secret detention facilities" run by the United Arab Emirates and allied militias in southern Yemen, reported sources.

According to the sources, Amnesty International said in a report on Thursday that it has documented "systemic enforced disappearance and torture and other ill-treatment, amounting to war crimes" in the facilities.

Some (detainees are) feared to have died in custody, the report noted. Amnesty called on the UAE government to immediately stop the torture, and to release detainees.

Moreover, the report added that the US should suspend intelligence gathering cooperation with the UAE, and stop supplying it with weapons. Amnesty said that the 51 cases of enforced disappearance took place between March 2016 and May 2018, out of which 21 are still missing.

Based on more than 70 interviews, the authors said "cruel and unlawful" practices were being committed in those prisons. Amnesty said it had collected testimonies from released detainees and relatives of the missing across Yemen.

"We've done this through interviews with families, government officials, current and former detainess," Tirana Hasson, director for crisis response at Amnesty, told sources.

"We've also been on the ground in Aden ... and all fingers point to really alarming patterns of abuse that have been ongoing now for well over a year, and they have been taking place within a culture of impunity."

The "most egregious violations" were committed in the "network of secret detention facilities" maintained by the UAE, Tirana said.

Last year, the Associated Press news agency reported that the UAE and its allied militias were running a network of secret detention facilities, beyond the control of the Yemeni government.

Andreas Krieg, assistant professor at the defence studies department of King's College London, told Al Jazeera that the UAE's presence in Yemen was aimed at furthering the country's interests in the region.

"They [UAE] have been sucked into the Yemen war at the invitation of Saudi Arabia but there has been an agreement with Saudi Arabia that if the UAE got involved in Yemen, they do so to advance their own national interests, which are not necessarily the same as Saudi interests because Yemen really never posed a direct threat to the UAE [and] neither did the Houthis," Krieg said.

"For the Emiratis, Yemen is an access point to the Indian Ocean and the horn of Africa and if you see the string of pearls that is emerging, Yemen is in many ways the crown jewel in this string of pearls that the UAE have lined up across the horn of Africa."

Asked whether the UAE was planning to make its presence in Yemen permanent, Krieg said that Abu Dhabi had "dug in deeply," having built sustainable relations with local surrogates who have been involved in the detention camps.

In June, the AP revealed that hundreds of detainees had been subjected to sexual abuse and torture.