Yemen has regained control of a besieged southern town from al-Qaeda fighters, authorities said on Saturday before militants sprayed a bus in Sanaa with bullets, wounding 10 intelligence agents.
"Security forces backed by army units succeeded at dawn on Friday to clear out the city of Hawta where al-Qaeda terrorist elements were holed up" since September 18, an interior ministry spokesman said.
The forces were pursuing "terrorist elements who fled to the mountains surrounding the city," added the spokesman, whose statement was carried by the official Saba news agency.
But the military’s reported advances in the south were followed by a setback in the capital Sanaa at dawn on Saturday, when two gunmen ambushed a bus carrying intelligence agents to work.
The unidentified attackers fired automatic weapons at the bus before fleeing, the security services said, adding they were probably militants of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
The agents were taken to hospital, and two of them were in serious condition, according to a medical official.
On Wednesday, Yemeni troops said they were preparing to go on the offensive against militants entrenched in the Shabwa provincial town and its surrounding mountains, sparking a mass exodus of civilians.
Of the town’s 20,000 residents, between 8,000 and 12,000 had fled by Tuesday, the Yemeni Red Crescent reported at the time. The U.N. refugee agency put the number at 4,000 on Friday.
But the al-Qaeda fighters had been blocking further departures with a view to using residents as human shields, a Yemeni security official said at the time.
In a statement on Wednesday, rights group Amnesty International quoted residents from areas near Hawta as saying the militants in the town were not al-Qaeda members.
Hawta is one of two Yemeni towns to have been attacked by suspected al-Qaeda militants in the past month.
British warningBritain warned Friday of "massive dangers" to world security should Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country and an increasing stronghold of al-Qaeda, become a failed state.
The situation in Yemen was described as "a very potent cocktail for danger" by Britain’s international development minister Alan Duncan at a meeting at U.N. headquarters in New York.
AQAP claimed responsibility for a plot to blow up an airliner in the United States on Christmas Day last year. The attack was foiled only when the alleged bomber’s explosive failed to ignite properly.
Yemen, which is also battling a sporadic Shiite rebellion in the north, is the ancestral homeland of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and has seen repeated attacks by his jihadist network.
The formerly independent south of the country has also witnessed growing discontent with the Sanaa government spearheaded by a coalition of secessionist and autonomist groups dubbed the Southern Movement.
The organization denies any connection with al-Qaeda.
One of its exiled leaders, Ali Salem al-Baid, has described the campaign against the militants in Hawta as a bid to secure funding from donors.