Yemen: bomb blast near Aden airport kills at least 12 civilians

Attack in interim capital comes weeks after car bomb targeted Aden’s governor

Yemeni emergency service staff and bystanders gather at the site of the blast near Aden airport. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Agence France-Presse-Sat 30 Oct 2021 

At least 12 civilians have been killed in a blast near the airport of Aden, the Yemeni government’s interim capital, a senior security official told AFP.

There were also serious injuries, said the official, adding that the cause of the blast on Saturday was unknown. Another security official confirmed the death toll.

The explosion came almost three weeks after six people were killed in a car bomb attack that targeted Aden’s governor, who survived.

AFP footage on Saturday showed people pulling out a body from a vehicle that had been completely destroyed, as firefighters put out flames nearby.

The internationally recognised government relocated to Aden from the capital Sana’a in 2014, forced out by the Houthis, who are fighting Saudi-backed Yemeni government loyalists.

A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen’s war in 2015.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Saturday’s blast, which is the deadliest in the area since December last year, when an attack targeting cabinet members ripped through Aden’s airport.

At least 26 people, including three members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were killed and scores were wounded when explosions rocked the airport as ministers disembarked from an aircraft. All cabinet members were reported to be unharmed, in what some ministers said was a Houthi attack.

Also on Saturday, three children were killed and three more were critically wounded in a neighbourhood of Yemen’s third city, Taiz, by what state media said was rebel mortar fire.

 

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“The Iranian-backed Houthi militia targeted the al-Kamp neighbourhood with … shells, which led to the death of three children,” the Saba news agency said.

One of the wounded children has had his legs amputated and all three “are in a critical condition”, it added.

A security official told AFP that the three children killed were brothers. A doctor at Taez hospital confirmed the report to AFP, and said the total dead could rise.

Taiz is a city of 600,000 people under government control in the south-west of Yemen, a country that has been at war for the last seven years.

In recent weeks, fighting has intensified around the government’s sole remaining northern stronghold – the city of Marib in the oil-rich province of the same name. The coalition has said it has killed a total of 2,000 rebels around the city in almost daily strikes since 11 October.

Yemen is also home to al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula, which launches periodic attacks against fighters aligned with the country’s authorities and the insurgents.

Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed and millions displaced in Yemen’s conflict, which the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.