16 Year Old Suicide Bomber Wandering Aden?
Sounds hokey, hopefully its a false report, not that I would expect less of al Qaeda than to send a boy to murder himself and others to further their imperrialsit agenda. Now with the threat in Aden, Saleh can blame all the raids, checkpoints and round ups on the hunt for the boy. I wonder if they will say he was at the compound of al Ayyam newspaper that they they shot up and set fire to last night…
DUBAI — Counter-terrorism authorities are said to be hunting for a 16-year-old boy from northern Yemen suspected of having been recruited by Al Qaeda to be a homicide bomber at one of five foreign targets in the southern port city of Aden, according to Western sources close to Yemeni security officials.
Yemeni officials also believe that several members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the wing of Al Qaeda that operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, have entered Yemen in the past few days, and that a key terror group official still is hiding in Abyan, a Yemeni province in southern Yemen. Abyan is the former home of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, a group of Islamic militants who were active in the late 1990s and are believed to have been involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in Aden in 2000…
The Westerners close to Yemeni security officials said that the information about the existence of a 16-year-old homicide bomber came from interrogations of Islamic militants captured in late December following joint Yemeni-American air attacks on Dec. 17 in Abyan and Shabwa provinces. The Yemeni government said that over 60 militants were killed in the attacks, but local sources have claimed that the air strikes killed mostly civilians, including women and children…
Yemeni police said that their security forces, under heavy American pressure to move against Islamic extremists, had captured a key Al Qaeda leader they said had prompted the U.S. and British embassies to close their missions temporarily. The police identified the man as Mohammed al-Hanq, who they said had evaded arrest Monday during a security force raid in Arhab, about 25 miles north of Sana’a. Two of al-Hanq’s relatives were said to have been killed, and three other people were wounded.
The state-run news agency Saba said that al Hanq, a regional leader of Al Qaeda, was arrested Wednesday, along with two others who were wounded in an attack at a hospital in the province of Amran, north of Sana’a. American officials were quoted as saying that the “successful” security operations north of the capital had enabled the threat level to be reduced and the embassy to reopen on Tuesday.
