Yemeni troops killed a senior al-Qaeda leader in one of the terror groups southern hideouts, officials said yesterday. The Government said that it would only hold dialogue with militants who agreed to lay down their arms and join an official rehabilitation programme for Islamist insurgents. The successful operation that killed Abdullah Mehdar, a commander of al-Qaeda forces in the tribally dominated province of Shabwa was, however, offset by an ambush carried out by militants who killed two policemen and wounded four others in an ambush in the same region.Regional tensions again flared when President Ahmadinejad of Iran publicly criticised neighbouring Saudi Arabia for attacking Yemeni Shia rebels who are fighting the weakened Government in the north of the country. We were expecting Saudi officials to act like a mentor and make peace between brothers, not enter the war and use bombs, cannons and machineguns against Muslims, said Mr Ahmadinejad, a day after a senior Saudi defence official said that the kingdoms forces had killed a large number of Shia rebels, known as Houthis, who had been holding a border post inside Saudi Arabia. If only a small part of the weapons of Saudi Arabia were used in favour of Gaza and against the Zionist regime, today there would be no sign of the Zionist regime in the region, Mr Ahmedinejad said in an inflammatory televised speech. There have been fears recently that the complex conflict in Yemen an impoverished, fragile state facing a bitter Shia rebellion in the north and a swelling secessionist movement in the once-independent south could spill over into a regional conflict between Tehran and Saudi, the worlds two leading oil exporters. Yemen believes that Iran is backing the Houthi rebels, while Tehran has warned the Sunni kingdom in the past against wading into the conflict. Into this volatile mix has stepped a resurgent al-Qaeda, which launched the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a US airliner from Yemen, and which has been attempting to rally support against the unpopular Government in the lawless tribal lands of the southeast. Yemeni officials said that Mehdar, a commander of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular in the area of al-Houta in Shabwa province, was shot dead after troops surrounded the house he was hiding in. Four other suspects were arrested but another 18 managed to escape, tribal sources said. The Government has sent thousands of reinforcements to tribal areas in response to US pressure to crack down on al-Qaeda, and has frequently used air strikes to target suspected terrorist bases. Senior Yemeni officials have warned that Saudi and Egyptian jihadists are streaming into the country as Pakistan fights the Taleban in their northern frontier zones and thousands of fresh US troops deploy into Afghanistan. But Abubakr al-Qurbi, Yemens Foreign Minister, Abubakr al-Qurbi, warned of the danger of the various conflicts developing links which could even stretch across competing ideologies, such as al-Qaedas belief that the Shia are heretics. He said that al-Qaedas stated support for northern rebels and southern separatists showed a kind of coordination between these three parties despite their different ideologies. He also stressed that lines between friend and foe become blurred in a country of shifting tribal loyalties, and where central government has traditionally been weak. What brings them together is their hostility to the Government. Besides, the former jihadist Tariq al-Fadhli is a now a leader of the southern movement, and is harbouring some al-Qaeda militants in their areas, he said, referring to an influential southern tribal chief who once fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and was until recently allied with the Sanaa Government. (The Times)