DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A conflict that for weeks has pitted Yemenis against each other and driven a rift between two powerful Gulf allies appeared to come to a head Friday, when an official from a separatist faction at the heart of the row announced that the group was disbanding.

However, the circumstances of the televised announcement raised serious questions about whether the group had made it of its own volition.

The separatist faction, the Southern Transitional Council, wants to carve out an independent state in southern Yemen called South Arabia and has received substantial backing from the United Arab Emirates.

That set the group on a collision course with Saudi Arabia, which supports Yemen’s internationally recognized government. On Tuesday, a delegation of officials from the Southern Transitional Council traveled for talks with the Saudi government in Riyadh, where the group announced Friday that it would disband.

Yet members of the delegation have been largely unreachable via mobile phone — by colleagues abroad, family members and New York Times reporters — since they arrived in Saudi Arabia early Wednesday.

“The delegation was coerced, in a disgusting and farcical display, into announcing the dissolution,” a senior official with the Southern Transitional Council, who is currently in the United Arab Emirates, wrote Friday on social media. The Saudi government did not immediately respond to requests for comment on that assertion, nor did the Emirati government.

Several officials who spoke to the Times said that the delegation did not speak on behalf of the entire council, but they demurred from saying explicitly whether their colleagues in Riyadh had been coerced into announcing the group was disbanding.

On Friday, one of the delegates in Riyadh, Abdulrahman al-Sebaihi, appeared on Yemeni state television and Saudi-owned channels reading the dissolution announcement from a piece of paper, in a stilted voice.

Mohammed al-Sahmi, a representative for the Southern Transitional Council in Britain, said by phone that the decision to dissolve the separatist group was not valid because it was done in Saudi Arabia without the full council’s vote. He also said he had tried to contact his colleagues in Riyadh, to no avail.