US backing for Yemen

FBI director Robert Mueller visited Yemen yesterday, pledging to help quell an Islamist insurgency, as security and government sources said a US drone had killed a prominent al-Qaeda leader linked to an attack on a French oil tanker.

In a meeting with president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who took office earlier this year, Mr Mueller said the US would support Yemen “with full force” in all respects. The Yemeni embassy in Washington said that Mohammed Saeed al-Umda, convicted in 2005 of involvement in the 2002 attack on the Limburg oil tanker, had been killed in an air strike on his convoy in Maarib on Sunday. Umda trained under Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and was in charge of the group’s finances, a security source said.