Suicide car bomber kills eleven people in latest Yemen violence
3 terrorists killed near presidential palace
ADEN, Yemen/SANAA, May 11, (Agencies): A suicide car bomber killed 10 Yemeni soldiers and one civilian and wounded many others on Sunday after targeting a military police building in the southern coastal city of Mukallah, state news agency Saba said.
The blast appeared to be a revenge attack by al-Qaeda over the Yemeni army’s campaign to crush Islamist insurgents in two large southern provinces.
This has ousted many militants from towns they first seized during mass unrest in 2011 that jeopardised national security and posed a serious threat to major oil producer Saudi Arabia next door.
Rescuers picked through the rubble of the two-storey building to search for survivors from the blast, which hit the complex as the soldiers were having lunch, a local security official told Reuters.
“We cannot tell the wounded from the dead,” the official said. Saba cited a security source as saying 15 soldiers were wounded in the attack.
Residents said ambulances had been evacuating the wounded from the scene of the blast which had sent shrapnel flying into nearby residential buildings. “It was a strong explosion and it shook Mukallah,” resident Salah al-Hamawi told Reuters by telephone.
In a separate assault in the Yemeni capital on Sunday, three gunmen were killed after they tried to attack a security checkpoint, the Interior Ministry said, the second such incident close to Sanaa’s presidential palace in as many days.
The checkpoint attack also appeared to be retaliation for the army offensive, which state news agency Saba said had killed or wounded hundreds of al-Qaeda members.
Western powers are concerned al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) could use Yemen as a springboard for future international attacks.
Keen to stem a stubborn Islamist insurgency that has targeted security forces, military facilities and foreigners, Yemen’s army went after the militants last month in the south.
Citing a military source, Saba said the military had recently killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders, most of them foreigners. The army had captured weapons, equipment and bomb-making workshops, it said.
Suspected
Meanwhile, three “terrorists” were killed Sunday in clashes at a checkpoint near Yemen’s presidential palace, two days after a suspected al-Qaeda attack on the same post killed five guards, the interior ministry said.
A civilian was also killed in the gunfight which erupted at dawn after gunmen attacked the presidential guard checkpoint near Misbahi roundabout, around 500 metres (yards) from the palace, a statement said.
Authorities use the term “terrorists” to refer to al-Qaeda militants in the impoverished Arab country, where an army offensive against jihadist strongholds has been underway since April 29.
Sanaa has been on alert for days, and tensions rose after the army said troops had entered Azzan, a jihadist bastion in southern Shabwa province, prompting the United States to close its Sanaa embassy on Thursday.