Yemen Arrests Some al-Qaeda
SANAA (Reuters) - Yemeni security forces have arrested a suspected al Qaeda member along with four comrades in the east of the Arabian Peninsula country, the Interior Ministry said on Wednesday.It identified the man as Haitham bin Saad and said he was arrested in the Hadramout region, an Islamist stronghold. “Those arrested are in custody in a prison run by state security in Sayun district to be later moved to Sanaa,” a state-affiliated website (www.26sep.net) quoted the ministry as saying.
June 17
M&C:
Sana’a, Yemen - Yemeni police have broken up an al-Qaeda cell that has been plotting terrorist attacks against foreign interests and government facilities in the capital Sana’a, an online news outlet reported Tuesday.
Officers from the National Security Agency raided the cell and arrested all its members late on Monday, the RayNews web site said, without giving numbers of those arrested.
It said the group’s leader, Riydh al-Salehi, was among the arrested suspects. The report describes al-Salehi as a ‘leading member of al-Qaeda in Yemen.’
The authorities did not comment on the report.
Yemen’s Interior Ministry has said that security forces had arrested 11 suspected members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network in Sana’a late in May. It said the detained suspects gave information during questioning about acts of terror carried out by the network.
An al-Qaeda arm in Yemen has claimed responsibility for several mortar attacks in Sana’a in the past few months, including one that targeted a residential compound housing US citizens on April 6 and another against the US embassy on March 18.
On Sunday, Yemeni Vice President Abdu-Rabu Mansour Hadi said his country had expelled 16,000 suspected members of the al-Qaeda network since 2005 as part of its efforts to fight terrorism.
Hadi said the expelled suspects belonged to various nationalities and many of them were those known as the Arab Afghans.
Arab Afghans are Muslim Jihadi veterans from various Arab countries who had fought against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Yemen received thousands of those militants after the war ended in 1989.
Hadi said the suspected militants were sent back to their home countries between 2005 and 2008. He did not name any of the countries.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, Yemen allied itself with the United States in the so-called war on terrorism and cracked down on armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Security forces have also rounded up hundreds of Arab Afghans and foreign students at unregistered religious schools across the Arabian Peninsula country.
Schools, they want to talk about the schools?
From May, foreign al-Qaeda:
Sanaa, 30 May (AKI) - Yemeni security authorities have identified 70 militants belonging to al-Qaeda or to Shia rebel factions loyal to insurgent leader Imam Abdul Malik al-Houthi, and will be arrested in the next few days, pan-Arab daily al-Hayat reported.
About 30 of the wanted militants are thought to be very dangerous, as they are reportedly followers of Osama Bin Laden.
Yemeni security officials quoted by the paper said they are confident that in the next few days the wanted militants will be arrested, due to vital information provided by 11 al-Qaeda militants who were arrested in capital Sanaa earlier this week.
According to al-Hayat , those arrested were directly involved in terror attacks in Sanaa during March and April and belonged to Jund al-Yemen, al-Qaeda’s branch in the country.
Among the arrested are six Saudi citizens, three Chadians and two Yemenis.
Jund al-Yemen claimed responsibility for the double car-bomb attack near the Italian embassy in Sanaa on 30 April.
Also on Thursday, government troops arrested rebel leader Fadl al-Houthi along with Ahmad Daghsan, another al-Houthi field commander.
The Shia rebels together with the revival of al-Qaeda cells in Yemen represent the most important security threats in the country and have led to the deaths of hundreds of Yemeni soldiers.
In the past, the authorities in Yemen have accused the Iranian government of financing the rebel movement led by al-Houthi.
Bombing the camp of the central security forces
