Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - A United States Special Operations commando and a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Yemen shot and killed two armed Yemeni civilians who tried to kidnap them while the Americans were in a barbershop in the country’s capital two weeks ago, American officials said on Friday و New York Times , reported.
The two Americans, attached to the United States Embassy, were whisked out of the volatile Middle East nation within a few days of the shooting, with the blessing of the Yemeni government, American officials said.
News of the shootings comes at a perilous moment for the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose collaboration with American drone strikes against suspected members of Al Qaeda is already a subject of seething resentment in Yemen. Yemenis believe, with some evidence, that the drone strikes often kill nearby civilians as well as their targets, so any indication that Mr. Hadi’s government helped conceal the killing of Yemenis by American commandos could be problematic.
Violence in the country is increasing, and on Friday, militants attacked a checkpoint outside the presidential palace, apparently in retaliation for the government’s roughly 10-day offensive against Qaeda strongholds.
Exactly what the two Americans were doing at the time of the shooting on April 24 is unclear. Some American officials said they were merely getting a haircut in a barbershop on Hadda Street in Sana, in an upscale district frequently visited by foreigners, playing down any suggestions that they were engaged in a clandestine operation.
Late Friday, both the Pentagon and C.I.A. declined to comment on the shooting, and referred all questions to the State Department.
“We can confirm that, last month, two U.S. Embassy officers in Yemen fired their weapons after being confronted by armed individuals in an attempted kidnapping at a small commercial business in Sana,” a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said in an email response to questions from The New York Times. “Two of the armed individuals were killed. The Embassy officers are no longer in Yemen.”
A spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, Mohammed Albasha, said he was aware of the shooting but had no information about any American role in the matter or his government’s response to that role.
The killings were reported in the Yemeni news media in the days after the shooting but attributed to unknown gunmen.
American officials refused to identify the Americans or their jobs in Yemen, where the Pentagon and the C.I.A. have been training Yemeni security forces in addition to carrying out the drone strikes. But a senior American official said one individual involved in the shooting was a lieutenant colonel with the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the other was a C.I.A. officer.
It was unclear whether the two American officers violated embassy security protocols when they visited the barbershop, apparently alone. In high-risk countries like Yemen and Pakistan, American diplomatic personnel are often tightly restricted in where and when they can travel outside the embassy walls, and are typically accompanied by armed security personnel.
“Per standard procedure for any such incident involving embassy officers overseas, this matter is under review,” Ms. Harf said in the email.
The killings have an echo of a 2011 case in which a C.I.A. security officer, Raymond A. Davis, was jailed for weeks after killing two Pakistanis on a crowded street in Lahore. The ensuing furor brought relations between the C.I.A. and Pakistan’s spy service to perhaps their lowest ebb since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Yemeni government is a staunch counterterrorism ally, and administration officials are no doubt seeking to avoid a replay of the 2011 debacle. “There will certainly be an investigation, and one would have to assume it will be informed by what happened in Pakistan,” one American official said.
American officials have voiced fears about the violence erupting in Yemen. The State Department announced on Wednesday that it had closed its embassy in Sana to the public because of security concerns, citing recent attacks against Western interests in Yemen as the reason for temporarily suspending operations.
The violence came close to the president’s doorstep on Friday when militants believed to be from Al Qaeda’s franchise attacked a security vehicle and killed three soldiers in the area of the presidential palace. News reports said the militants had fought a prolonged gunfight in the streets of the capital before escaping. In a second attack in the Bayda Province, militants believed linked to Al Qaeda killed two soldiers and injured many more in an ambush, according to officials in the area.
And in a third attack the same day, armed fighters from the Abida tribe in the restive province of Marib attacked security checkpoints, electricity towers as well as oil and gas pipelines, residents there said. All of Friday’s attacks appeared to be retaliation for the Yemeni government’s campaign against Qaeda strongholds, which follows a series of American drone strikes last month that resulted in the deaths of more than three dozen militants linked to Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, one of the largest flurries of strikes in recent years.
As the army’s ground campaign has picked up, so have a series of attacks against Western interests. Several diplomatic outposts have pulled back or pulled out. At the American Embassy, personnel are not being evacuated, but closing the facility to the public will stop the processing of visas and other services, the State Department said.
In the Yemeni news media, the involvement of American commandos in the shooting has not been disclosed. The day after the shooting, the Yemeni Defense Ministry’s website, 26sep.net, reported that a foreigner living in Yemen had shot dead two gunmen who tried to abduct him.
“Two armed men tried to kidnap a foreign citizen as he was leaving a barber in Hadda Street in Sana,” the website said. “But he was able to resist and shot them with a revolver he had in his possession,” the website said, citing security sources.
The ministry gave no indication of the intended victim’s nationality or that of those who planned to kidnap him. In subsequent news reports, however, unidentified Yemeni security officials attributed the shootings to various suspects, including a well-trained American citizen with a licensed weapon and a Russian specialist in the oil sector.
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