• Gunmen Kill U.S. Embassy Employee in Yemen
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[IMG]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/10/12/world/middleeast/12yemen/12yemen-articleLarge.jpg[/IMG] [SUB]People gathered Thursday at the site of the killing of Kasem Aklan, a Yemeni employee of the United States Embassy in Sana. [/SUB] [QUOTE]SANA, Yemen — A senior Yemeni officer working in the United States Embassy in Sana was killed on Thursday in an attack that security sources said bore the hallmarks of the regional Al Qaeda franchise. The killing comes amid sharp American scrutiny of security at foreign diplomatic posts in the wake of the militant assault on the American mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed an American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other diplomatic personnel. Witnesses said that two men on a motorcycle drove up alongside the car of the embassy employee, Kasem Aklan, and one of them opened fire, killing him. Mr. Aklan was in the west of the city, but it was not immediately clear whether he was on his way to the embassy, which is in the eastern part of Sana, the capital. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but militants have attacked official targets in Yemen in response to the government’s campaign against cells of the regional franchise, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which American counterterrorism officials have called the terror network’s most active affiliate. Mr. Aklan had worked at the embassy for more than a decade, an official and security sources in Yemen said. In his most recent position at the embassy, he was employed as a security investigator and liaison, a fairly common position in American embassies which means he could be doing work that involved background checks or coordinating with local police. The United States Department of State did not issue an immediate statement on Mr. Aklan or the circumstances of his killing. Officials in Yemen had said he had been helping to look into the episode last month in which protesters furious over a video produced in the United States that mocked the Prophet Muhammad breached the compound’s outer security perimeter. The demonstrations were part of wider regional unrest over the video that started in Cairo and spread to nearly 20 countries across the Middle East and beyond. It was during the start of that unrest that militants overran the Benghazi mission. Separately, the headless bodies of three soldiers were found Thursday near Marib, a city east of Sana, local security sources said. Local residents said suspected operatives of the branch of Al Qaeda operating in Yemen kidnapped the three soldiers on Wednesday from the same checkpoint and returned their bodies there on Thursday morning after beheading them. Earlier in the week, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for beheading three Yemeni men whom the group accused of spying for Yemeni intelligence while posing as Al Qaeda operatives. Their bodies were dumped on three streets in Marib. [/QUOTE] [URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/world/middleeast/yemeni-employee-at-us-embassy-in-sana-is-shot-dead.html?_r=0]Source[/url]
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