Thirteen killed in mosque blast in Yemen rebel region

A booby-trapped motorcycle exploded as hundreds of Muslim faithful were leaving the Bin Salman mosque in the town of Saada after Friday prayers, soldiers who were among the worshippers told AFP.

The attack on the mosque, located near an army barracks, raised fears of an escalation in the standoff between the government and the Shiite rebels whose on-off insurgency has claimed thousands of lives since 2004.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but a local official said it bears the hallmark of the "Huthis," as the rebels are known.
The injured were almost all soldiers.

Witnesses earlier spoke of dozens of casualties as ambulances rushed to the scene of the attack. Some said the target may have been the mosques imam, or prayer leader, an army officer who adheres to the rigorous Salafi school of Sunni Islam. Witnesses said he was not hurt.

Military personnel are among the faithful who usually pray at the Bin Salman mosque.

Mosques in Yemen cater for both the majority Sunni community and the Zaidis, a Shiite offshoot, but are usually identified by the sect of their prayer leader.  The mountainous northwestern province of Saada has been the site of a rebellion by members of the Zaidi community that has killed thousands of people in the past four years.

On Tuesday night, seven soldiers were killed and 20 wounded when a convoy of three troop transports was ambushed by rebels in the region.

The insurgents are known as Huthis after their late commander, Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi, who was killed by the army in September 2004.

The renewed violence comes despite recent efforts to implement a peace deal between the government and the rebels brokered by Qatar in June 2007.

The agreement, under which the insurgents would lay down their arms, was revived during a meeting between the two sides in Doha in February.

Qatari mediators were still in the capital Sana’a on Friday, but Yemeni authorities rushed military reinforcements to Saada in the past few days amid mounting tensions with the rebels.

The rebels have been fighting to restore the Zaidi imamate, which was overthrown in a 1962 republican coup in Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries. The rebels reject President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime as illegitimate, although Saleh himself is a Zaidi.

The Zaidis are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen but form the majority in the northwest.

Yemen, an Arabian Peninsula country with a tribal structure, has been repeatedly hit by violence in recent weeks.

Two attacks in Sanaa in March and April targeted US interests and were claimed by the local wing of the Al-Qaeda network.

On Wednesday, two car bombs exploded inside the compound of customs headquarters in Sana’a, but there were no casualties.