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| Yemeni Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Mujawar gestures as he arrives in Sanaa yesterday |
The official said Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Mujawar arrived in the capital Sanaa yesterday evening and was greeted at the airport by hundreds of government officials and supporters.
Mujawar had been receiving medical treatment in Riyadh, along with a number of other presidential aides and Saleh himself.
Saleh has repeatedly said he will also return to the impoverished country, which has been paralysed by months of protests against his 33-year authoritarian rule.
A senior official of Saleh’s party, Soltan al-Barakani, said on television that parliamentary speaker Yahia al-Rai, who was also hospitalised in Riyadh after the June 3 attack, would return to Sanaa next week.
Howver Barakani was uncertain of when Saleh would come back, saying, “The decision rests with the president, and with his doctors.”
In the southern province of Abyan, Islamists emboldened by the months of upheaval have taken control of at least three towns since March.
Seven soldiers were killed yesterday and 30 others wounded in an attack launched by suspected Al Qaeda militants on a base in Abyan, a senior officer said.
“Six soldiers and an officer were killed and 30 others wounded when Al Qaeda militants attacked the camp of the 201 Brigade in Dofes,” south of Abyan’s capital Zinjibar, the officer said.
The attackers had used the cover of a wooded area around the base to approach a unit of the brigade and opened fire with rocket-launchers and automatic weapons.
An official from a military hospital that took in the casualties confirmed the toll.
On Monday, government warplanes killed six presumed Al Qaeda fighters in Arkub, another village in Abyan province that they had seized a day earlier.
Tribesmen said they saw militants load dead bodies into a car and speed off towards the coastal town of Shaqra, which they took over last week.
Some tribesmen have sided with the Yemeni army to try to flush militants out of Abyan, setting up checkpoints along roads and last month launching an offensive that has so far failed to recapture much lost ground.
Residents of Lawdar, also in Abyan, said a man driving a motorcycle laden with explosives, thought to be a suicide bomber, blew himself up by accident at dawn yesterday on the outskirts of the city.
The US and Saudi Arabia fear that upheaval in Yemen is giving militants, who the government says belong to Al Qaeda, more room to launch attacks on the region and beyond.
Opponents of Saleh accuse him of exaggerating the threat of Al Qaeda and even encouraging militants in order to illustrate the dangers of Yemen without him and pressure Riyadh and Washington into backing him.