Policeman gunned down in Yemen: official

Source: AFP, 11/01/2010

ADEN, Yemen — Two attackers on a motorbike in a south Yemen town gunned down an officer who featured on an Al-Qaeda hit list of policemen to be killed, a security official said on Monday.
One of the attackers drove the motorbike while the other shot the criminal investigations officer, Ghazi al-Samawi, the official said.

The attack took place Sunday night in the town of Zinjibar in Abyan province.
Witnesses said the attackers yelled "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest) as they carried out the killing and then sped off.

Samawi featured on an Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) list of 55 policemen to be targeted for killing.

AQAP on Saturday claimed responsibility for the September ambush of a bus carrying Yemeni intelligence agents, saying it killed 14 people.

The US-based SITE monitoring service also reported that AQAP claimed it had assassinated a colonel named Abdul al-Karim al-Baan in the southern Lahij province, whom it described as "the head of investigations."

AQAP also said it had shot an intelligence officer named Al-Hashidi in the province, without saying whether or not he died, and said it was responsible for an attack on a security and intelligence buildings in Lahij.

Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, is battling a growing Al-Qaeda threat, a sporadic Shiite rebellion in the north and a separatist movement in the south.