U.S. Officers Kill Armed Civilians in Yemen Capital
WASHINGTON
— 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.
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.
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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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