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| Yemen Slayings Probed for al-Qaida Link |
| 2002-12-31 |
| Yemeni interrogators suspect the man accused of killing three American missionaries at a Baptist hospital may have ties to al-Qaida, officials said Tuesday, as U.S. investigators joined the search for those behind the murders. Two of the slain Americans were buried Tuesday in the southern Yemeni town of Jibla, where each had worked for more than two decades and where the attack took place. The third was to be flown back to the United States. The U.S. Embassy said it was too early to tell if terrorism was behind Monday's shootings at a Southern Baptist hospital. But Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Kader Bajammal included the slayings in a list of terrorist acts he presented to parliament later in the day. Officials close to the investigation said Yemeni interrogators have strong suspicions the accused gunman has connections to Osama bin Laden's terror network. Yemen is bin Laden's ancestral homeland and has been a fertile recruiting ground for him. President Ali Abdullah Saleh condemned the shootings as ``criminal and disgraceful'' in a message to President Bush and said they would ``strengthen our determination to eradicate terrorism,'' the official news agency Saba reported. In addition to interrogating the suspect, investigators were questioning prisoners picked up in earlier sweeps of suspected Muslim militants to see what they knew about Kamel. The suspects included some believed 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 had said Kamel claimed to have ties to a cell plotting attacks on foreigners and secular-minded politicians. And we can't have any of those in a muslim country Kamel told interrogators that he plotted the attack in collaboration with Ali al-Jarallah, who was arrested for shooting dead a senior Yemeni leftist politician on Saturday, Saba reported. Another rhodes scholar. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 Update from Utusan Malaysia Online: "Kamel was believed to be a student at Yemen's Al-Iman university, which is run by controversial Al-Islah Party thinker Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani and was closed briefly last year as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. Ali al-Jarallah, a fundamentalist who shot dead the deputy leader of the Yemen Socialist Party (YSP) at an Al-Islah conference in Sanaa on Saturday, went to the same university. Sources close to the investigation said Kamel confessed to being one of five Islamist activists charged with carrying out five operations, including the assassination of the YSP's Jarallah Omar. They did not specify who was behind the orders." Sounds to me like this isn't the "lone gunman" that was first reported. |
| Posted by: Steve 2002-12-31 14:09:51 |