The US was accused last night of summarily executing the six alleged al-Qaeda members killed in Yemen on Sunday by the first act of what experts say could be a new age of ”robotic warfare”.
As the embarrassed Yemeni government remained tight-lipped about the assasination on its soil more details emerged of how an unmanned CIA predator drone found the six men in a car and killed them with a Hellfire missile.
It was reported that the Yemeni intelligence service had monitored them for months, and relayed the information to the Americans.
Tribesmen in Marib province said a Yemeni air force helicopter was hovering over the area moments before the explosion occurred.
Yesterday the Yemeni cabinet issued a brief statement urging people to unite against ”terrorist activities targeting our country, its people and its national economy”, but it refused to say whether it had given the CIA permission to carry out the attack.
Officials declined to contradict their earlier suggestion that the deaths might have been caused accidentally by explosives being carried in the car, whose occupants apparently included Qaed Senyan al-Harithi, who was suspected of being involved in the terrorist attack on USS Cole in Aden two years ago.
In Washington officials admitted that the CIA had carried out the operation.
The Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, told the Swedish news agency TT: ”If the USA is behind this with Yemen’s consent, it is nevertheless a summary execution that violates human rights. If the USA has conducted the attack without Yemen’s permission it is even worse. Then it is a question of unauthorised use of force.”
Walid al-Saqqaf, editor of the Yemen Times, said: ”The Yemeni government is now in a very weak position. It means they no longer have sovereignty over the country.”
While defence experts said the incident could herald a new era of robotic warfare, international lawyers debated the legal implications of the surprising turn in US strategy: killing specific individuals in countries where there is no war.
”To have a drone that engages and kills people, that is quite a threshold to cross,” Clifford Beal, editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly, told Reuters.
”This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it. The CIA does not have any qualms. This is really the first success story of this system.”
The Predator drone said to have carried out the attack has a range of 640 kilometres and would not necessarily have been launched in Yemen.
The CIA and the Pentagon refused to comment on its performance yesterday.
Anthony D’Amato, a professor of international law at Northwestern University in Chicago, said Yemeni consent would probably not affect the legality of the attack.
”In a war you have the right to shoot the combatants of the other side, and one of the things Bush accomplished when he called it a war against terrorism was to turn questions like this in his favour.”
”In the very earliest days the notion of assassinating a terrorist in another country would have been questionable, but not after so many Israeli-Palestinian episodes.”
If Washington had substantive evidence that the six were al-Qaeda members, Yemen would effectively be ”harbouring” them, making its consent immaterial according to precedents established as far back as the Vietnam war. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 001