SANAA (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda militants attacked two Western targets in Yemen on Wednesday, firing a rocket at a senior British diplomat’s car and killing a Frenchman at a gas and oil installation.
The attacks bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda. The group has threatened to strike against Western targets and the Yemeni government, which declared war on its local arm after it claimed a failed attack on a U.S.-bound airliner in December.
In London, the British Foreign Office said a British Embassy vehicle carrying the deputy chief of the British mission was attacked and that one British embassy staff member in the vehicle suffered a minor injury.
“The vehicle was on its way to the British embassy, with five embassy staff on board,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.
“One member of staff suffered minor injuries and is undergoing treatment, all others were unhurt.”
A security source in Yemen said three Yemeni bystanders were wounded in the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack. President Ali Abdullah Saleh met the British envoy to discuss the attack.
The Frenchman died in a shooting incident inside the compound of Austrian-owned oil and gas group OMV, France’s Foreign Ministry said. A security source said a Yemeni guard working for a private security firm went on a shooting spree, and government forces subsequently disarmed him.
Authorities had arrested dozens of al Qaeda suspects and were questioning the 20-year-old guard, a security official said.
Bystanders said the guard repeatedly shouted Islam’s rallying cry of Allahu Akbar (God is Greatest) while shooting the victims, the official told Reuters.
In London, Foreign Secretary William Hague called it a “shameful attack.”
Both attacks followed tightened security in the capital of the country whose conflicts with a resurgent al Qaeda, secessionists in the south and Shi’ite rebels in the north has raised Western and Gulf Arab fears it is on the verge of becoming a failed state.
WORSENING SECURITY
Those fears worsened after the Yemen-based arm of al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attempt to bomb a U.S.-bound airliner. The group also said it was behind a failed attempt to kill the deputy interior minister of Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor and the world’s top oil exporter.
“These twin attacks reinforce the overall picture that the security situation in Yemen has been deteriorating since the start of the year, since the Yemeni government and the U.S. stepped up their fight against al Qaeda,” said Nicole Stracke of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.
“Al Qaeda has been reacting to this. But these attacks are not an escalation - it’s clear they are under huge pressure and it shows in their operations. Shooting an RPG is not a complicated operation,” she said.
Stracke also said the militants may have chosen to target the British embassy because it was les heavily fortified than the U.S. embassy in Sanaa. An al Qaeda suicide bomber attacked the British ambassador’s convoy in April, killing himself and injuring three others.
The U.S. embassy in Sanaa condemned Wednesday’s attacks. “The deliberate targeting of civilians is an abhorrent act,” the embassy said on its website.
A policeman gestures at the scene of a rocket attack that targeted a vehicle carrying the deputy chief of the British mission in Sanaa October 6, 2010. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
A Yemeni embassy spokesman in Washington said the attacks would not affect Yemen’s resolve in fighting al Qaeda.
Yemen’s population of unemployed youths are seen as potential recruits for Islamist fighters. Western donor nations including Britain backed Yemen in its fight against al Qaeda at a United Nations meeting in New York last month.
More than 40 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people live on less than $2 a day, and concerns about instability and corruption have hampered growth and made unemployment worse.
LINKS TO BIN LADEN
Yemen is the ancestral home of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, who is thought to be in hiding somewhere in the border area of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Analysts say Yemenis have long formed a significant body of al Qaeda footsoldiers abroad.
Al Qaeda in Yemen announced last year that Yemen was the base for its Saudi and other Gulf operations. It stepped up attacks this year in apparent reprisal for the government’s increased collaboration with the United States.
Yemen’s Western allies and Saudi Arabia have long feared a resurgent al Qaeda wing could take advantage of rising insecurity and weak central control to use Yemen as a base for attacks that would destabilize the region and beyond.
The failed airliner bombing prompted Washington to step up training, intelligence and military aid to Sanaa. Yemen cooperated with Washington after the September 11 attacks of 2001 to stamp out the group’s presence.
An al Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassy in Sanaa in 2008 killed 16 people, including six attackers.
(Additional reporting by Tim Castle in London and Raissa Kasolowsky in Dubai; editing by Ralph Boulton)
Writing by Andrew Hammond; Editing by Samia Nakhoul
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