Al-Qaida chief’s drone death hailed

The reaction came before a car bomb targeted the motorcade of the country’s defence minister, killing at least 13 people, but the minister, Major General Mohammed Nasser Ahmed, on his way to attend a Cabinet meeting, escaped unharmed.

Eight of his security guards were killed. The other five dead were civilian bystanders.

The al-Qaida chief, Saeed al-Shihri, a Saudi national who fought in Afghanistan and spent six years in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, was killed by a missile after leaving a house in the southern province of Hadramawt, according to Yemeni military officials.

They said the missile was believed to have been fired by a US-operated, unmanned drone aircraft.

Two senior US officials confirmed al-Shihri’s death but could not confirm any US involvement in the air strike. The US does not usually comment on such attacks although it has used drones in the past to go after al-Qaida members in Yemen, which is considered a crucial battleground with the terror network.

Yemeni military officials said that a local forensics team had identified al-Shihri’s body with the help of US forensics experts on the ground. They said they believed the United States was behind the operation because its own army did not have the capacity to carry out precise aerial attacks.

Al-Shihri’s death is a major blow to al-Qaida’s Yemen branch, which is seen as the world’s most active, planning and carrying out attacks against targets on and outside US territory.

The nation sits on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula and is on the doorstep of Saudi Arabia and fellow oil-producing nations of the Gulf and lies on strategic sea routes leading to the Suez Canal.

The group, known as Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, took advantage of the political vacuum during unrest inspired by the Arab Spring last year to take control of large swathes of land in the south. But the Yemeni military has launched a broad US-backed offensive and driven the militants from several towns.

After leaving Guantanamo in 2007, al-Shihri, believed to 
have been in his late 30s, went through Saudi Arabia’s famous “rehabilitation” institutes, an indoctrination programme that is designed to replace what authorities in Saudi Arabia see as militant ideology with religious moderation.

But he headed south to Yemen upon release and became deputy to Nasser al-Wahishi, the leader of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Wahishi is a Yemeni who once served as Osama bin Laden’s personal aide in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaida in Yemen has been linked to several attempted attacks on US targets, including the foiled Christmas Day 2009 bombing of an airliner over Detroit, and explosives-laden parcels intercepted aboard cargo flights last year.

Last year, a high-profile US drone strike killed US-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who had been 
linked to the planning and execution of several attacks targeting US and Western interests, including the attempt to down a Detroit-bound airliner in 2009 and 
the plot to bomb cargo planes in 2010.

US drone strikes have killed several key al-Qaida operatives, including Samir Khan, an al-Qaida propagandist who was killed last year, and have intensified in recent months.

Meanwhile, the leader of al-Qaida has confirmed the death of the group’s second-in-command, who was killed in a US drone strike in north-western Pakistan in June. In a video posted on militant websites, Ayman al-Zawahiri described Abu Yahya al-Libi as a “lion of jihad and knowledge”.

The killing of al-Libi, who was Libyan by birth, was the 
biggest setback to al-Qaida 
since the death of Osama bin Laden.