Four Yemenis with grenades, guns detained near US embassy
Four Yemenis carrying hand grenades and guns were arrested near the U.S. embassy in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, the Interior Ministry said late on Tuesday.
A Ministry statement said the four, aged between 20 and 33, had hand grenades, automatic weapons and ammunition. It did not say when they were arrested.
"The four were detained for questioning especially because they were caught in an area near the American embassy," it said.
The ministry said the four were residents of a town called Damaj in the northern province of Saada, where the government is battling a revolt by Shiite Muslims of the Zaydi sect.
The Arab world’s poorest country is also battling a wave of al-Qaeda attacks and rising secessionist sentiment in the south.
Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has targeted the U.S. Embassy in the past. In September 2008, gunmen backed by suicide bombers assaulted the walled compound in an attack that left 19 dead, including six attackers. Months before that, militants fired mortars at the embassy but missed, hitting a nearby school and killing one Yemeni.
The ancestral home of Osama bin Laden’s family, Yemen was the scene to one of al-Qaeda’s most dramatic pre-9/11 attacks, the 2000 suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole off the Aden coast that killed 17 American sailors.
International concern over Yemen has been heightened because instability there could endanger neighbors including oil-rich Saudi Arabia and complicate efforts to combat al-Qaeda and piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
The United States on Sunday offered to help Yemen in its "fight against terrorism". U.S. President Barack Obama said in a letter to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh that the United States will "stand beside Yemen, its unity, security and stability."