'Qaeda' gunmen kill Yemeni police as attacks spread

Fierce clashes broke out at dawn between the armed men and police around the local branches of intelligence and central bank, and the courts in the Lahij province town of Huta, before dispersing toward nearby farms, residents said.

A medic at Ibn Khaldun hospital said it received the body of one policeman killed in the attack while six others were hospitalised.

One of those wounded later died in hospital, Lahij governor Ahmed Abdullah al-Majidi told AFP, adding that extra security forces were posted outside public buildings and on the outskirts of town.

The attack raised fears that Huta might fall in the grip of the jihadists after gunmen overran most of the city of Zinjibar in late May.

"There are no police out on the streets ... The people are very scared," said local resident Mahmud al-Itri.

After the Huta attack, Yemen's interior minister sacked the head of security for Lahij province, Thabet al-Qodsi, according to a local security official.

Yemen's security forces have been heavily deployed in Aden amid fears that clashes between the army and alleged al Qaeda gunmen might spread to the strategic port city.

At least 81 soldiers and police have been killed and more than 200 others wounded in the Zinjibar clashes, according to a military official.

Security officials say the militants are al Qaeda fighters, but the opposition challenging the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh accuses the government of inventing a jihadist threat to head off Western pressure on his 33-year rule.

Yemen is the home of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an affiliate of the slain Osama bin Laden's militant network. The group is blamed for anti-US plots including trying to blow up a US-bound airplane on Christmas Day in 2009.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2011