Al-Qaeda militants have kidnapped an intelligence officer today in Yemen's south while unknown gunmen killed a soldier and a policeman in separate attacks, a security official told AFP.
"Masked Al-Qaeda armed men stopped a bus in Loder," in Abyan province, which has become one of the
jihadists' stronghold, and "abducted a Yemeni intelligence officer named Fadhel Ahmed Mohsen," said the official.
In Zinjibar, Abyan's provincial capital, "unknown armed men on a motorbike shot dead a soldier," said the same official who requested anonymity. In a separate attack, also in Zinjibar "unknown armed men attacked two policemen... killing one and seriously wounding the other," he added. Such attacks are frequent in the impoverished south Arabian Peninsula country, where Al-Qaeda fighters have regrouped in lawless regions.
Yesterday, six Yemeni soldiers were killed in a tribal revenge attack in the southeastern province of Al-Baida, a tribal leader and a security official said. State news agency Saba described the assailants as a "terrorist group." In Abyan, also yesterday, a security official told AFP that "unknown armed men on a motorbike shot dead a policeman, Hamzah al-Saadi, and fled."
Yemen has been gripped by deadly protests since late January calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh who has been in power since 1978. Besides an Al-Qaeda resurgence, the impoverished country is battling a secessionist movement in the south and a Shiite rebellion in the north.