Sana'a, Yemen - Yemeni police have arrested a local member
of the terrorist al-Qaeda organization in the north-eastern province
of Hadhramout, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.
In a statement posted on its website, the ministry said the
suspect was captured in the desert area of Hadhramout, some 900
kilometres south-east of the capital Sana'a.
It identified the captured suspect as Haitham bin Sa'ad. He was
arrested along with four bodyguards.
An al-Qaeda arm in Yemen has claimed responsibility for several
mortar attacks in Sana'a in the past few months, including one that
targeted a residential compound housing US citizens on April 6 and
another against the US embassy on March 18.
Last week, Yemeni police reportedly broke up an al-Qaeda cell that
has been plotting terrorist attacks against foreign interests and
government facilities in Sana'a.
Reports said the cell's leader, Riydh al-Salehi, was among the
arrested suspects.
Yemen's Interior Ministry has said that security forces had
arrested 11 suspected members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network in
Sana'a late in May. It said the detained suspects gave information
during questioning about acts of terror carried out by the network.
Last week, Yemeni Vice President Abdu-Rabu Mansour Hadi said his
country had expelled 16,000 suspected members of the al-Qaeda network
since 2005 as part of its efforts to fight terrorism.
Hadi said the expelled suspects belonged to various nationalities
and many of them were those known as the Arab Afghans.
Arab Afghans are Muslim Jihadi veterans from various Arab
countries who had fought against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in
the 1980s. Yemen received thousands of those militants after the war
ended in 1989.
Hadi said the suspected militants were sent back to their home
countries between 2005 and 2008. He did not name any of the
countries.
After the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington,
Yemen allied itself with the United States in the so-called war on
terrorism and cracked down on armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Security forces have also rounded up hundreds of Arab Afghans and
foreign students at unregistered religious schools across the Arabian
Peninsula country.
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