By: Mohamed Al-Azaki
The recent suicide attacks against South Koreans tourists in Yemen, four of whom were reported killed last March, have been detailed by al-Qaeda in a new video statement released entitled “I Have Won I Swear to Kaaba's God.”
The videotape was released through the jihadi media outlet Al-Malahim (al-faloja.info, June 28), reporting that the two separate attacks against South Korean official investigators and tourists in March were premeditated. An al-Qaeda's approach which some analysts say it seems destined to damage the government's reputation.
It also claimed that it had known the Korean security officials' movements - who came to Sana'a to investigate the earlier assault against Korean tourists - before they raided them while en route to the Sana'a International Airport as leaving Yemen.
"Al-Qaeda's main plan is to weaken Yemeni President Saleh's regime, and defeat his government in the field of security and economy," says Abdul Elah Shayea, a writer and terrorism specialist who conducted in last January an exclusive interview with al-Qaeda's leader in Yemen, Nasir Abdul Kareem al-Wuhayshi (a.k.a. Abu Basir). "They have the capacity to freely move, collect information, recruit new would-be suicide bombers and carry out a string of suicide attacks."
As the two teenage suicide bombers addressed final messages to their families – of course, they had been recorded some weeks or months before the bombings - , the video film was showing new different types of explosions whereby they killed Koreans.
Perhaps al-Qaeda here is seeking to prove the Yemeni Intelligence wrong, which claimed that the two suicide bombers were strapping explosive belts on their waists.
Moreover, no one in al-Qaeda's group in Yemen, says Shayea, "had been trained in Somalia." Mr. Shayea denied the Interior Ministry's reports that one of the two suicide bombers had been trained in Somalia. He said," Al-Qaeda in Yemen actually doesn't need support from Somalia…the leader al-Wuhayshi confirmed to me in the interview that his group has been sending support to Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Palestine."
"Al-Wuhayshi told me – in the interview – that the militant Palestinian group Hamas had refused to allow al-Qaeda's fighters of Yemeni nationals who entered Gaza when the border line in Rafah was bombed, to stay."
According to the videotape, Abdul-Rahman bin Mahdi, 18, used a booby-trapped picture frame of a waterfall for killing South Korean tourists at a UNESCO World Heritage site in Hadhramout, in the eastern part of the country, leaving as many as four dead and six others injured.
Three days later, the 20-year-old suicide bomber, Khaled al-Dhayani, targeted a motorcade of South Korean official investigators and victims’ families while on their way to airport of the capital Sana’a after its visit to the scene of earlier blast.
Al-Qaeda in the video film claimed it had set the date, time, place and the ready man to carry out the second suicide attack, showing off teenage boy, al-Dhayani, being groomed as suicide bomber while holding in his hands a medium-sized cassette player, which is full of explosive substances.
Indeed, as they were travelling with Yemeni officials in a three-car convoy to the airport, al-Dhayani blew up the booby-trapped cassette player at the particular place on time, next to the gate of Sana'a Daylami Military Airbase. Car windows were shattered but no one was hurt.
Al-Qaeda said both suicide bombers had been kept under constant surveillance by the government's secret police a long time before it included them in its martyrs' brigade.
Abdul-Rahman bin Mahdi was living in the city of Taiz, 170 miles south of the capital Sana'a, and Khaled al-Dhayani was resident near the U.S. Embassy in Sana'a. After they escaped the police, al-Qaeda claimed it had found them while they were roaming the streets in Sana'a.
It's true, explains Mr. Shayea, al-Qaeda's militants freely wander around the Sana'a streets. "I had firstly met al-Qaeda's military commander, Abu Hurairah Qasim al-Raymi, in a 'street' in Sana'a to review with him the questions I proposed to carry out an interview with al-Qaeda's leader in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who I met three months afterwards," he added.
Recently, the Interior Ministry has made public the names of twelve al-Qaeda fugitives it says have planned to carry out suicide attacks in the country.
It is worth noting that four of the 12 wanted fugitives have the original names appeared in the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim Magazine, in last may, giving the two dead suicide bombers their congratulations for achieving the attacks against Koreans.
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