All eyes on al-Qaida after Yemen shooting

Yemeni investigators today said they strongly suspect a man who gunned down four American missionaries had links to the al-Qaida terror network.

The government labelled yesterday’s attack in Jibla as terrorism, but US diplomats said it still too early to tell.

Three of the missionaries died and one was seriously wounded. An FBI team arrived overnight to help with the investigation.

Yemeni officials said interrogators believe the gunman, 30-year-old Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, may have ties to Osama bin Laden’s terror group.

Yemen is bin Laden’s ancestral homeland and has been a fertile recruiting ground for him.

Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Kader Bajammal hastily added the killings at the Southern Baptist hospital, 125 miles south of the capital San’a, to a report on terrorism presented to parliament late yesterday.

As well as interrogating the suspect, investigators were questioning prisoners picked up in earlier sweeps of suspected Muslim militants to see what they knew about Kamel. A US diplomat said American officials were “very close” to the interrogation, but gave no further details.

The suspects picked up in earlier sweeps included some believed to be linked to al-Qaida and some to a small Yemeni group known as al-Jihad.

Al-Jihad, which attracted many Yemenis who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, had chiefly targeted secular figures from once-socialist southern Yemen. It had not been active for several years.

Earlier, officials said Kamel claimed to have ties to a cell plotting attacks on foreigners and secular-minded politicians.

The official news agency Saba quoted an official as saying the suspect told interrogators he plotted the attack 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 Yemeni left wing politician on Saturday.

Kamel had slipped past security at Jibla Baptist Hospital cradling his hidden gun like a baby.

He entered a room where the director was conducting a meeting and opened fire. After shooting three people in the head, killing them instantly, the gunman headed to the pharmacy and shot the pharmacist in the abdomen.

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

Pharmacist Donald Caswell, 49, was recovering in hospital after surgery, his father said.

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 cooperation 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.

In his report to parliament, Prime Minister Bajammal included the Jibla shootings among 15 “major terrorist acts” in Yemen since 1997.

Others included the October 6 suicide bombing of a French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen and a similar suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in October, 2000.

Both ship attacks were blamed on al-Qaida, which also is held responsible for last year’s September 11 attacks in the United States.

“Terrorist acts, in particular the attack on the USS Cole and the Limburg tanker, resulted in enormous material and moral damage which have tarnished the image of our country and made it appear a fertile land for terrorism and terrorists,” the prime minister said.