People gather around the intelligence officer’s vehicle that was destroyed in the bomb attack in Aden yesterday.
Gunmen shot dead an army colonel and a car bomb injured a senior intelligence officer in Yemen’s main port city of Aden yesterday, a security official said.
Yemen’s armed forces are fighting against an Islamist insurgency across southern Yemen after militants took advantage of political chaos during the “Arab Spring” in 2011 to seize control of several towns.
Western governments see Yemen’s stability as vital for international security because of the country’s location next to main oil exporter Saudi Arabia and alongside important crude shipment routes.
They fear a further descent into chaos as the country attempts to unite opposing regional and political factions may create more space for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to operate.
Yemen’s Al Qaeda wing last week claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a police headquarters, and an offshoot claimed an assault on the defence ministry in which more than 50 people were killed last month.
The gunmen in a pick-up truck attacked Colonel Mubarak Lashram, an official in the military supplies department, killing him and badly injuring another soldier, before fleeing.
The intelligence officer, Colonel Saleh al-Qadhi was driving between two main districts in Aden when a parked vehicle exploded, seriously injuring him, the security official said.
Last week gunmen shot dead Colonel Marwan Muqbili, an intelligence officer, in Aden.
The shootings and bomb attack this year follow a string of similar assaults on security and military officers in southern Yemen over the past year.
*Tribesmen in the eastern province of Hadramout have blown up an oil pipeline for the second time in two days, disrupting an important source of revenue for the impoverished state.
The attacks targeted a pipeline with a capacity of 120,000 barrels a day carrying crude from the Masila field, the most important in Yemen, local and tribal officials said.
Yesterday’s blast, which caused a fireball that could be seen from several kilometres away, struck in the Wadi Urf area, while Monday’s attack on the same pipeline was in the Sah area.
Tensions between tribes in Hadramout and the government have been running high since early December, when an important chief was killed in a shooting at an army checkpoint, local media have reported.
The tribes have demanded the authorities pull their forces from the province, have attacked government and energy facilities and late last month overran an oil ministry building in Hadramout.
