International
Yemeni President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi on Thursday issued a presidential decree dismissing Brig. Ammar Mohammed Abdullah Saleh from his position as a military attaché in Ethiopia, hours after a former Al-Qaeda informant told Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit that Saleh facilitated a 2008 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa that killed 18 people.
Saleh, a nephew of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, was the deputy director of the National Security Bureau when he allegedly transferred funds to Hani Muhammad Mujahid, at the time an Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) informant, to finance the attack.
Mujahid also alleged that the brigadier had a close relationship with Qasim al-Raymi, AQAP's military commander.
The former informant made the claims to Al Jazeera for a documentary, Al-Qaeda Informant,” which focuses on his allegations that Ali Abdulla Saleh supported and even directed AQAP while he was Yemen's president.
During his work as an informant, Mujahid said, he provided information about the U.S. Embassy assault and an attack that killed eight Spanish tourists in July 2007. In both cases, he says, his information was ignored.
Given the revelations, the Spanish newspaper El País reported on Thursday that Esteve Maso, a survivor of the 2007 car bomb attack at the Balqis Temple in Marib, Yemen, called on Spanish judges and prosecutors to reopen an investigation into the bombing. Maso lost his wife in the bombing, which also killed two Yemenis.
A team of Spanish investigators went to Yemen at the time. However, Yemeni authorities failed to cooperate with their probe, so the case in Madrid was closed, pending new information
With wire services
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Al-Qaeda operative turned informant alleges that Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government colluded with Al-Qaeda in Yemen
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