Aden: Three police officers and at least three suspected Al Qaida militants were killed in clashes on Wednesday in Yemen’s southeastern Hadramawt province, an extremist stronghold, police said.
Al Qaida suspects hiding in two houses in Hadramawt’s city of Shahr opened fire at police searching the area, an official said.
The clashes broke out around dawn on Wednesday and continued intermittently for several hours before spreading to neighbouring parts of the city, the police official said.
“The bodies of three Al Qaida fighters were taken by security forces to the Ibn Sina hospital in Mukalla,” Hadramawt’s capital that lies 35 kilometres from Shahr, said another security official, without giving a precise figure on the number of militants killed.
Security officials said they have arrested women suspected of being Al Qaida militants after the security operation.
The officials said that the women and a number of children were arrested early on Wednesday. They said the arrests came after the suspected female militants fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades at authorities in Shahr.
Officials said the male militants on motorcycles later joined the fight.
Officials say the women are believed to be Saudi nationals. They say the women were transferred to Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, for further interrogation.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to journalist. Fighter jets flew over Shahr, where normal business came to a near standstill on Wednesday, according to residents.
But the clashes subsided later in the afternoon and army vehicles pulled out of the area, according to residents.
On Tuesday, three extremists were killed by a drone strike that targeted their vehicle in the same province, local officials said.
AQAP took advantage of a decline in central government control during Yemen’s 2011 uprising — which eventually forced president Ali Abdullah Saleh from power — to seize large swathes of territory across the south.
The militants were driven back in June 2012 and the group has been weakened by US drone strikes.
But AQAP remains active in southern and eastern Yemen, and regularly carries out hit-and-run attacks on security forces.
The group has also been linked to several attempted attacks on the US, including a botched bid to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day in 2009.
