Islamic militant kills three American doctors in Yemen

A YEMENI shot dead three American doctors and critically wounded a US pharmacist yesterday at a missionary hospital in the south of the impoverished country.

Yemeni officials named the gunman as 32-year-old Abed Abdel Razzak Kamel and said he was an Islamist militant who had told police after his arrest that he had shot the two men and two women to "cleanse his religion and get closer to Allah."

The US embassy confirmed the victims were US citizens and said they were working at the Jibla Baptist hospital in Ebb province, some 105 miles south of the capital Sanaa.

"The gunman confessed to being a member of (Yemen's) Islamic Jihad group and said he shot the Americans because they were preaching Christianity in a Muslim country," one Yemeni official said.

Witnesses said Kamel had entered the hospital posing as a patient, then opened fire on the four Americans at the outpatient clinic when it was his turn to receive treatment.

Yemen is seen in the West as a haven for Muslim militants, including members of the al-Qaida network that Washington blames for the attacks on the United States last year.

Anti-US sentiment has been running high in many Arab countries in recent months, prompted by anger at Washington's support for Israel, the US-led war against Afghanistan and a possible attack against Iraq.

US officials declined to name the victims and said in a statement a team of US investigators had been sent to Jibla.

"We still don't know how to describe this incident," a US diplomat said.

In Jibla, hospital administrator Julie Toma said she believed it was an isolated incident. She said she believed the shooting was linked to preparations to hand the American hospital, which was set up in Yemen in 1964/5, over to a Yemeni administration.

"It was a backlash against that. It was an isolated incident," Ms Toma said, adding that as a Westerner she felt safe living in Yemen.

The US statement, however, advised US citizens to bolster their personal security and said it was requesting additional security for the already fortified embassy building.

Local security sources linked Kamel to Ali Jarallah, a member of an Islamist opposition party who shot dead a prominent opposition official earlier this week.

In October, suspected militants attacked a French supertanker off the coast of Yemen, about a year after suspected members of al-Qaida killed 17 US servicemen in a suicide bomb attack on the US destroyer Cole.

Yemen has co-operated with Washington's declared war on terror after the attacks on the United States and has rounded up dozens of al-Qaida suspects.

A missile fired by a CIA pilotless drone killed six al-Qaida members in Yemen in November, including a key suspect in the Cole attack.