Sana’a: Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi has rejected efforts by clerics and tribal chiefs to broker a truce with Al Qaida, insisting that the militants must lay down their arms, an official said on Tuesday.

“The president wants members of Al Qaida to surrender their arms, announce their repentance and renounce their extremist ideas,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), considered the jihadist network’s most dangerous franchise, announced on several Islamist websites that the truce efforts had failed.

The mediators, who launched the initiative in January, had already revealed in a statement on February 5 that their efforts had run into trouble.

They said Hadi had refused to sign up to a truce proposal which had been accepted by AQAP chief Nasser Al Wahishi.

The collapse of the mediation bid came as a suspected Al Qaida suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a building in the southern Yemeni city of Loder, killing 13 pro-government militiamen and wounding 25 others.

The attack targeted a post which belongs to the Popular Resistance Committees, whose militiamen have battled militants linked to Al Qaida in the area.

Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s branch in Yemen, has claimed responsibility for several suicide attacks across Yemen.

Last year, the Yemeni government launched a wide-scale attack on posts manned by Al Qaida in the southern Abyan province. Militants from the group have taken advantage of the Yemeni uprising in 2011, which resulted in the ousting of president Ali Abdullah Saleh, to seize large swathes of territory across areas in the south.

Al Qaida militants were driven out of most cities in Abyan province, including Loder, in June last year in an offensive by troops backed by militia.

Yemeni forces continue to hunt Al Qaida militants in the rugged south and east, aided by US drone attacks.

The militants took advantage of a decline in central government control during a 2011 uprising that forced veteran president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power to seize large swathes of territory across the south, including most of Abyan province, which they controlled for a year.

- with inputs from DPA