Two Al-Qaeda militants were killed in south Yemen on Thursday in a remote province where the terrorist organization is active, the defense ministry said.
Residents said they saw a drone in the air at the time, according to Agence-France Presse.
Witnesses said a missile fired by an aircraft targeted two brothers, Abdullah and Mubarak al-Harad, who were in a car in the province of Shabwa, where Al-Qaeda is well entrenched. The men died instantly.
A third person was wounded in the attack in the town of Nissab, the witnesses added.
The attack follows the killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden by US forces in Pakistan on Sunday and took place as Yemen is gripped by a standoff between President Ali Abdullah Saleh and a protest movement bent on his overthrow.
The United States and neighboring Saudi Arabia want the crisis resolved, fearing a protracted standoff could lead to clashes between rival military units and igniting chaos across the country that Al-Qaeda could exploit.
Al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, formed from the 2009 merger of the group’s Yemeni and Saudi wings, has vowed to bleed US resources with small, swift attacks that force the West to spend billions of dollars in defense.
It tried but failed to kill Saudi Arabia’s security chief in 2009 and claimed responsibility for a failed attempt the same year to blow up a Detroit-bound plane. It was also blamed for bombs found in cargo en route to the United States in 2010, according to Reuters.
Yemen, a US ally against Al-Qaeda, declared open war on the Yemen-based arm in January 2010, stepping up air strikes in which civilians as well as militants were killed.
A US diplomatic cable leaked in November 2010 said the United States was carrying out air raids on Al-Qaeda targets in Yemen, and that Mr. Saleh agreed to conceal this from the public.
Yemen is the poorest of the Arab League’s 22 member-states, and 40 percent of its 24 million people live on $2 a day or less.