DUBAI - Four people were killed and several others injured on Sunday when a suicide car bomb exploded outside the home of the director of security for the southern Yemeni port city of Aden, eyewitnesses and medics said.
The four men killed were guards for Brigadier General Shalal Ali Shayyeh, who survived a car bomb attack on his convoy on Jan. 4 amid an escalating wave of assassinations against security forces in the city.
The government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has been grappling with lawlessness there since militiamen, backed by a Saudi-led Arab military alliance, drove the Iran-allied Houthi group out in July.
Yemen descended into a civil war last March when the Houthis forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia after they closed in on Aden, drawing a Saudi-led coalition into the Yemen conflict. Alliance and anti-Houthi forced seized Aden from the Houthis over the summer but have yet to impose control on the city where militants and other gunmen have a prominent presence. In a rare security incident in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa, gunmen on a motorbike also shot dead a police colonel. Ground fighting and air strikes have killed around 6,000 people during the nine-month war in impoverished Yemen. The United Nations estimates about half that number are civilians.
A local official in the village of Bilad al-Rus outside Sanaa said a prominent local journalist, Almigdad Mojalli, was killed in a Saudi-led air strike on Sunday. Mojalli, a reporter for several Western and international news outlets, died while investigating the site of a mineral bath that residents said was hit by coalition planes last week, killing 15 civilians. Moreover, A suicide bomber killed at least six people, including four civilians, Sunday in an attack on the residence of the police chief of Yemen's southern city of Aden, security official said. ‘A suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden minibus at the entrance of the house of General Shalal Shaea,’ in the neighbourhood of Tawahi, the official told AFP. The police chief was not hurt, he said. But another official said ‘at least six people, including four civilians, were killed in the attack’.
It was the latest attack in a wave of unrest that has rocked the port city, ised as a base for the government, which was forced to flee Sanaa in September 2014 after Iran-backed Huthi rebels swept into the capital. It was not immediately clear who was behind the bombing. The Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have established a strong presence Aden.
A freelance Yemeni journalist was killed Sunday in an air raid by the Saudi-led coalition on rebel-held Sanaa, a witness said. Almigdad Mojalli was hit by shrapnel as a missile slammed into the capital's southern Jaref suburb while he was covering air strikes, said his colleague, photojournalist Bahir Hameed.
‘Planes were hovering above when we were struck,’ Hameed said. According to his Twitter account, Mojalli reports for Voice Of America and the IRIN humanitarian news agency. At least five journalists were killed in Yemen last year, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF). More than 5,800 people have been killed in Yemen since the coalition launched its air campaign in support of the government last March, about half of them civilians, according to the UN.
Relief agency Doctors Without Borders said it delivered Sunday medical supplies to areas besieged by the rebels in Yemen's flashpoint Taez city for the first time in months. The group known by its French acronym MSF said two trucks ‘full of essential medical supplies’ entered the southwestern city in the first such operation in five months. The last time a ‘significant’ shipment of medical supplies reached the city was in August, it said.
‘We're grateful that we managed to deliver the medical supplies to the hospitals,’ said in a statement Karline Kleijer, MSF's emergency manager for Yemen. The Paris-based medical humanitarian organisation said treating the wounded and surgery had at times been suspended over the past five months due to lack of supplies. ‘The checkpoints in combination with severe fighting in the area have severely hampered humanitarian access into this part of the city,’ it said of areas besieged by the Shiite Huthi rebels.
The 600,000 residents of Taez have been in dire need as Huthis besiege the community defended by pro-government forces. Aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition, which is fighting the Iran-backed rebels, has dropped 40 tonnes of medical equipment and food in Taez, a Saudi charity said on Wednesday.
The coalition has since March conducted air and ground operations in Yemen to support local forces against the rebels and their allies. More than 5,800 people have been killed in Yemen since March, about half of them civilians, according to the UN.