An explosion rocked on Monday a military base in south Yemen killing three soldiers and leaving another three in critical condition, the Yemeni official news agency Saba reported.
Saba quoted a security source in the port city of Aden as saying the explosion occurred inside the engineer armament base which is located in the Dar Sad district.
"A technical problem was behind igniting and exploding mortars which were gathered from Abyan province and stored inside a small room in the base," the official was quoted as saying.
The Yemeni army launched a US-backed offensive and drove Al-Qaeda militants out of their strongholds in Abyan and Shabwa earlier this year.
Other soldiers were slightly wounded in the explosion, which comes amid an effort by the power-sharing government to sort out Yemen's weapons and troops within the restructuring of the national forces.
The authorities rushed to the site and brought under control the fire which led to the explosion and an investigation has already been launched, the source continued.
Few days ago, mortar explosions rocked the first armored division in downtown the capital Sanaa that official reports said were blamed on mistakes while troops were on training.
The division of the Yemeni army continues since early last year when key military units defected to the popular uprising that ousted the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Meanwhile, the restructuring of the armed forces, which comes under the West-backed power-transfer deal, is facing big challenges including those by loyalists and relatives of who are holding key army posts.