SANAA, Sept 21: Two suspected Al Qaeda members and two policemen were injured in a raid on a suspected hideout of the network led by Osama bin Laden at dawn here on Saturday, the interior ministry said.
Police forces exchanged sub-machinegun fire with armed elements in the northern al-Rawdah neighbourhood, a spokesman at the ministry was quoted as saying in a statement faxed to AFP.
The authorities arrested three armed men, believed to belong to the terror network, who had barricaded themselves into a house, it said.
Police launched search operations for other members of the group who managed to escape.
A witness told AFP that “the police forces and the members of the group exchanged medium and light arms fire” before the authorities stormed the building.
The witnesses said a number of gunmen fled into the surrounding fields.
Yemen is the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States, which has voiced increasing concern that the Arabian peninsula republic has become a safe haven for Al Qaeda fighters on the run since being driven out of Afghanistan.
A Sanaa government official on Wednesday ruled out US military operations to fight Al Qaeda militants in Yemen.
“Yemeni forces alone are responsible for launching this campaign, with the cooperation of the Americans, who are limited to intelligence and training, not operations on the ground,” the official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
He was reacting to a US television report Tuesday on ABC News that the US military and CIA were preparing a large-scale covert operation in Yemen to neutralise a growing number of Al Qaeda fighters suspected to have found refuge in the country.
ABC News said more than 800 US troops and a dozen specialized helicopters were in Djibouti — including a contingent of the anti-terrorist Delta Force commando group — concealed within a French military base there.
In an interview with the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper on Saturday, Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi said Sanaa was cooperating with Washington on security issues, but “there is no US military base in Yemen.”
Kurbi said bilateral cooperation “focused on the issue of tracking down Al Qaeda members who may have links with terrorist actions and on the training of Yemeni security forces for the anti-terrorism fight.”
He said US instructors “do not constitute a US presence in Yemen because we are dealing with Washington on the basis of Sanaa’s interests and its constitution.”
Kurbi said the government had recently created 13 new police stations in remote rural regions to facilitate searches for Al Qaeda suspects.
“Other police stations will be installed in order to be able to continue the search for the (suspected) elements who are still hiding among the tribes,” he said.
Sanaa has long struggled to control the heavily armed tribes which have frequently resorted to kidnapping Westerners to pressure the central government to release scant resources.—AFP