DUBAI — Counter-terrorism authorities are hunting for a 16-year-old boy from northern Yemen suspected of having been recruited by al-Qaeda to be a homicide bomber at foreign targets in the southern port city of Aden, according to Western sources close to Yemeni security officials.
Fox News reported Yemeni officials also believe that several members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have entered Yemen in the past few days, and that a key terror group official still is hiding in Abyan, a Yemeni province in southern Yemen.
Abyan is the former home of the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, a group of Islamic militants believed to have been involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
Several Western institutions have quietly shut their offices in Aden and prompted families with children based there to leave, the sources said. There are believed to be only a few hundred Westerners still living in Aden.
The intensified threat in Aden comes at a time when the northern-based Yemeni government is not only battling a Shiite rebellion in the north but also a secessionist threat in the south. Regional experts fear that al-Qaeda may be trying to make common cause with those secessionist elements and enhance their appeal in what once was a separate country, South Yemen, of which Aden was the capital.
The Westerners close to Yemeni security officials said that the information about the existence of a 16-year-old homicide bomber came from interrogations of Islamic militants captured in late December following joint Yemeni-American air attacks on Dec. 17 in Abyan and Shabwa provinces. The Yemeni government said that over 60 militants were killed in the attacks, but local sources have claimed that the air strikes killed mostly civilians, including women and children.
Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, the 23-year-old Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines plane from Africa through Amsterdam on Christmas Day, has told U.S. investigators that he received training and instructions from al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen.
American officials recently announced that the U.S. would spend $70 million dollars to fund anti-terrorism activities in the nation, a huge increase in foreign assistance to a country that Washington had largely ignored for years.
Yemeni police said that their security forces, under heavy American pressure to move against Islamic extremists, had captured a key al-Qaeda leader they said had prompted the U.S. and British embassies to close their missions temporarily. The police identified the man as Mohammed al-Hanq, a regional leader who they said had evaded arrest Monday during a security force raid.
The deteriorating security situation in Yemen led President Obama to announce that no Yemeni prisoners currently being held at Guantanamo Bay military prison would be released to their homeland for an unspecified time. About 40 of 90 Yemeni prisoners being held there were said to have been cleared for release.
The administration also has added Yemen to the list of 14 countries from which nationals will be required to undergo compulsory enhanced screening when they fly to the United States.