6 Die in blast targeting official convoy in Yemen
Sanaa, Oct 10 (EFE).- Six people were killed and seven others wounded Sunday in a car-bombing directed at the convoy of the governor of the southern Yemeni port city of Aden, authorities said.
The governor, Ahmed Lamlas, survived the “terrorist assassination attempt,” as did Salem al-Suqatri, agriculture minister of the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC).
Lamlas leads the STC, currently in an uneasy partnership with Yemen’s Saudi-backed central government.
A vehicle packed with explosives was detonated as the convoy was traveling through the Hujaif neighborhood of Aden, where the Yemeni government established itself in 2015 after Houthi rebels drove President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi and his administration out of the national capital, Sanaa.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, which followed weeks of protests in Aden over chronic economic woes and tensions between the STC and their ostensible partners in the Saudi-backed government.
Al Qaeda and other extremist groups are also active in South Yemen.
The STC took control of Aden two years with help from the United Arab Emirates.
While the UAE was originally allied with Riyadh in the 2015 intervention to reinstate the Mansur Hadi government, the Saudi and Emirati agendas have diverged since then.
From 1967 to 1990, the southern and eastern provinces of Yemen constituted a separate nation, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. EFE
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