‘Dozens killed’ in Yemen raids

Fighters with links to al-Qaeda killed in south of the country, officials say.

yemen map

‘Many more killed’

Residents of Abyan said that there was no al-Qaeda training camp in the area and that the raids had destroyed several homes.

Abbas al-Assal, a local human rights activist who was at the scene, said 64 people were killed, including 23 children and 17 women.

“The government wants to show the world that it is serious in pursuing al-Qaeda elements and that the south of Yemen is a refuge for al-Qaeda. That is not true at all,” al-Assal told the Associated Press by telephone.

Ali Mohammed Mansour, gave similar casualty figures, and said that he helped bury the dead in a mass grave.

Attack criticised

Mohammed Hazran, Abyan’s deputy governor, said that 10 al-Qaeda suspects were killed in the attack, including Mohammed Saleh al-Kazemi, a Saudi who had resided in the country since fighting in Afghanistan.

He was imprisoned in Yemen for two years before being released in 2005.

A provincial security official said that “grave mistakes occurred in the operation due to failures of information, which led to a large number of civilian deaths”.

Mansour, the resident, rejected claims that targeted site was a training camp, and said that community was only 100 metres away from a main road and two kilometres from an army base.

“If [al-Kazemi] was wanted, why didn’t the authorities come and arrest him all this time?” he said.

Al-Qaeda fighters are thought to be living among tribes that have raised concerns with the central government, especially in the northeast of the country.

Yemen’s government has in recent months ordered a series of deadly raids against Houthi fighters in the north of the country, as well as a growing separatist campaign in the south of the country.

Source: News Agencies