Aden: The commander of military forces in the south of Yemen, Major General Salem Ali Qatan, was killed by a suicide bomber in the port city of Aden on Monday, days after troops drove Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda from their southern strongholds, media reported on Monday.
According to reports, the Defense Ministry said that the suicide bomber, a member of al Qaeda Islamist insurgency, hurled himself at Qatan’s vehicle, also killing two soldiers escorting him. It identified the bomber as a Somali but gave no other details.
Pools of blood coated the street where the bomber struck.
A doctor at the hospital where Qatan died said 12 other people, nine of them soldiers, were wounded in the attack in Aden, a port city overlooking oil shipping lanes fewer than 100 km (60 miles) from several cities which Islamists flying al Qaeda’s banner recently controlled.
Qatan was a central figure in plans to restructure Yemen’s military, which split into warring factions during the struggle over Saleh’s fate. His appointment to the southern command was one of the first moves by President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi against the former president’s loyalists in the army.
Yemen’s state news agency quoted Hadi as telling the head of the U.S. Central Command, Marine Corps General James Mattis, in a meeting in Sanaa on Monday that the assassination would not affect Yemen’s “counter-terrorism” cooperation.
The killing of Major General Salem Ali Qatan highlighted the tenuous grip of Yemen’s central authorities on the south despite a month of U.S.-supported bombardments and airstrikes aimed at crushing the militants.
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