Hospital gunman 'linked to terror cell'

The man suspected of killing three American missionaries and wounding another in southern Yemen is believed to have ties to a cell plotting attacks on foreigners and secular-minded politicians, officials say.

The suspected Muslim extremist slipped past security at Jibla Baptist Hospital, a Southern Baptist centre run by American missionaries, cradling his hidden gun like a baby.

He entered a room where the director was conducting a meeting and opened fire at about 8.15am local time (5.15am Irish time) yesterday. A suspect was later arrested.

“The man brought in a rifle under his coat as if cradling a baby bringing him into the clinic,” Jerry Rankin, president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board, said in Richmond, Virginia, where the organisation is based.

After shooting three people in the head, killing them instantly, the gunman headed towards the pharmacy and shot the pharmacist in the stomach, authorities said.

The Mission Board identified the dead as hospital director William Koehn, 60, purchasing agent Kathleen Gariety, 53, and Dr Martha Myers, 57.

Pharmacist Donald Caswell, 49, was rushed to hospital and was recovering from surgery, his father said.

The suspect was identified as Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, a 30-year-old Yemeni who claimed he was a member of a militant cell believed to be targeting foreigners and secular-minded Yemeni politicians and public figures.

The official news agency Saba quoted an official as saying the suspect told interrogators that he plotted the attack in collaboration with Ali al-Jarallah.

Yemeni officials say al-Jarallah is a Muslim extremist and a member of the fundamentalist Islamic Reform Party who was arrested for shooting dead a senior left-wing Yemeni politician on Saturday.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh condemned the shootings as ”criminal and disgraceful” and pledged to punish the perpetrators.

“We are confident that such a criminal act won’t affect the friendship and co-operation between our countries ... but instead strengthen our determination to eradicate terrorism,” Saba quoted the president as saying in a message to US president George Bush.

The Bush administration said investigators were trying to determine whether the attack was linked to terrorism.

“We strongly condemn and deplore the murder of three American citizens who were providing humanitarian assistance to the Yemeni people,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The shooting was the second recent attack on American missionaries in the region. On November 21, a gunman shot dead an American missionary nurse in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Lebanese authorities have yet to determine who was behind that shooting.

Anti-American sentiments are running high in the Middle East due to perceived US support for Israel and the standoff with Iraq. Many of the region’s predominant Muslims also believe US policy following the September 11 attacks comprised part of an anti-Islam campaign.

Abdul Salam Mohammed, a Jibla resident, said that the alleged assailant rented a house near the hospital nearly a month before yesterday’s attack.

“We didn’t see much of him during his stay in town as he didn’t use to go out much. I remember he had a long beard and a moustache,” Mohammed said. “On Monday morning, I saw him without both.”

A woman from Jibla who identified herself only as Fatima said the attack was “a crime unacceptable in any religion. This contradicts Islam”.

“They cared for us and looked after us. I can’t even count the number of children they treated and saved,” she said of the missionaries.

About 30,000 US citizens, most of Yemeni origin, live in the Arab country, the US Embassy says.

They were repeatedly warned to take security precautions in Yemen, a country where central government authority is weak, guns are plentiful and Muslim militants have found refuge.

Yemen, the ancestral homeland of terror chief Osama bin Laden, has been a key front in the US-led war on terrorism. Yemen has signed on as Washington’s partner after the September 11 attacks.

On October 6, an explosives-laden boat rammed a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen, killing one member of the tanker’s crew. US intelligence officials suspect al-Qaida in the attack.

In a similar attack also blamed on al-Qaida in October 2000, a suicide bomb boat hit the USS Cole in the southern port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors. Al-Qaida is also blamed for last year’s September 11 attacks in the United States.

US Ambassador Edmund Hull said investigators and security personnel were sent to Jibla, 125 miles south of the capital, San‘a. He said America and Yemen had “a good working relationship and US investigators would be assisting” their Yemeni counterparts.