Gulf | Yemen
Al Qaida 'not behind tourist attack' in Yemen
An Al Qaida man has said yesterday that his organisation was not behind the suicide bombing which killed Spaniards and Yemenis last week in Yemen.
- By Nasser Arrabyee, Correspondent
- Published: 00:15 July 10, 2007
Sanaa: An Al Qaida man has said yesterday that his organisation was not behind the suicide bombing which killed Spaniards and Yemenis last week in Yemen.
But he said a 'new generation' of Al Qaida might have been behind it.
"This is not Shaikh Osama Bin Laden's strategy at all," said Nasser Al Bahri, alias Abu Jandal, in an exclusive interview with Gulf News. Abu Jandal divided Al Qaida in Yemen into two generations: old and new.
"The new generation is not the generation of Osama Bin Laden, it is the generation of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, which is different from Al Qaida, although the word Al Qaida is used by some groups," said Abu Jandal who served four years as Bin Laden's bodyguard before he came back to Yemen where he was arrested after the suicide bombing of the US destroyer, USS Cole late 2000.
"It is the Iraq generation; they are young people who went there for jihad. They are inexperienced, misguided and wrongly mobilised. They think that the old generation has become unable to confront, and that they [the old generation] are cowards and agents or eyes against them," said Abu Jandal, who went to Bosnia, Somali and Tajikistan.
Since 2003, Abu Jandal has been considering himself in a truce with the enemies of his model, Osama Bin Laden.
He has been working as a taxi driver to support his four-member family in the Yemeni capital Sana'a although he and some of his Al Qaida colleagues live under semi-house arrest. They go to security agencies for signing every month after they promised the government to stop any armed activity.
He said wrong fatwas from some clerics and bad treatment by security officers in prisons were among the main reasons behind such violent behaviour of young people.
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