Security forces have arrested one of the top leaders of the al-Qaeda terror network in Yemen during a hunt for Islamic extremists in the southern province of Abyan, local officials said on Thursday.
”A senior official of al-Qaeda in Yemen who was wanted by the police was arrested Wednesday night,” in the Lawder area, said one official.
Sources named the man as Abdul Rauf Nassib, one of the most senior al-Qaeda officials, and the sole survivor of a missile attack launched from a US drone aircraft that killed six suspected al-Qaeda men in Maarib province of eastern Yemen on November 3, 2002.
Among the dead from the CIA-planned raid was Qaed Salem Sunian al-Harthi, suspected of organising a suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in the southern port of Aden that killed 17 American sailors in October 2000.
Security forces backed by helicopters, tanks and armoured vehicles were deployed on Wednesday in the area where they surrounded a remote hideout of a large number of suspected Islamic extremists.
They were alerted after the Islamists, from Yemen, Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, had gathered in the Lawder/Jebel Thar region, 250km south of Saana and 150km northeast of Aden.
On Sunday, an official in Sanaa said that two members of Yemen’s Islamic Jihad had been arrested after a shoot-out in Abyan, while police were searching for three escaped gunmen.
Yemen’s Islamic Jihad is suspected of links with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
In November, President Ali Abdullah Saleh freed or pardoned several dozen men suspected of al-Qaeda links, including Khaled Abdennabi, who had turned himself in and heads both the Jihad group and the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army.
Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama Bin Laden, has been under pressure from Washington since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to crack down on al-Qaeda militants. – Sapa-AFP