ADEN: Six people including four policemen were killed in overnight clashes in Yemen’s tense south, where a separate Qaeda-style ambush killed a tribal chief and his two bodyguards, local and tribal officials told AFP on Sunday.
Four policemen and two insurgents were killed as fighting between Yemen’s security forces and separatists intensified late Saturday in Habilayn in the southern province of Lahij, medics and local officials told AFP.
In an earlier tally, several officials told AFP that two policemen and an insurgent were killed in the clashes on Saturday.
The violence broke out at dawn after security forces put up a checkpoint outside Habilayn, leading to a showdown between Yemen’s army and insurgents from the Southern Movement, according to a local official.
"The situation is tense in Habilayn and government forces had to withdraw the reinforcements dispatched to the area," said residents contacted by AFP on Sunday.
Separately, a chief from the Al-Fadl tribe, Sheikh Hussein Saleh Mashdal, was killed in an overnight ambush along with his two bodyguards in Abyan, another southern province, a security official said.
The official, who refused to be named, blamed the attack on Al-Qaeda.
Mashdal was "leading the mediation between the authorities and alleged Qaeda insurgents" in the city of Loder, one of his relatives told AFP.
Fierce clashes in Loder between suspected Al-Qaeda insurgents and the army last month left at least 33 dead — 19 insurgents, 11 soldiers, and three civilians — according to an AFP tally based on official and medical sources.
Since August clashes, Yemen’s security services have arrested 14 alleged Al-Qaeda members in Loder, including a leader named as Salah Al-Dabani, the interior ministry reported late on Saturday.
Identified earlier as Salah Ali Abdullah Al-Damani, the alleged Al-Qaeda leader was arrested on Thursday in Loder, the defense ministry news website had said earlier.
Yemeni authorities arrested nine people, including a suspected local Al-Qaeda leader implicated in armed attacks in the south of the country, the 26sep.net website said.
Seven other people were detained in the Loder area on Wednesday and Thursday.
South Yemen, where many residents complain of discrimination by the Sanaa government in the allocation of resources, was independent from 1967 until 1990 when it united with the north. It launched an abortive secession bid in 1994.
The Southern Movement is a mix of secessionists and those who seek greater autonomy for the region.
Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country and the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, has also been struggling to combat an Al-Qaeda resurgence as well as Shia unrest in the north.
