YEMEN: Questions Arise Over Al-Qaeda Escape

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nabil Sultan

SANA'A, Feb 20 2006 (IPS) - The two U.S. helicopters that went down off the coast of Djibouti Friday killing ten on board could have been searching for Al-Qaeda members who had escaped from jail in Yemen, government sources said.

Thirteen of the 23 Al-Qaeda men who got away had been convicted in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 in which 17 U.S. troops were killed.

The Al-Qaeda members escaped from the central intelligence prison in capital Sana’a two weeks back.

The two helicopters with 12 on board were on a mission above the Yemeni coast to hunt for the escaped convicts, government sources said. The U.S. forces wanted also to block any escape into the Horn of Africa, the sources said.

U.S. military officials have said, however, that the two helicopters were on a routine mission, and have not linked the crash to the Al-Qaeda escape.

The helicopters were based in Djibouti, which has been a U.S. centre for counter-terrorism operations in the Horn of Africa. Djibouti is just a few miles across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen.

Among the men said to have got away are Jamal Al-Badawi, convicted as one of the masterminds behind the attack on the Cole, and Fawaz Al-Rabeeie, convicted for the attack on the French tanker Limburg in 2002.

According to official statements, the convicts, many under death sentence in the Cole case, dug a 150-metre tunnel under the prison into the women’s section of an adjacent mosque. The mosque is next to the offices of the Political Security Organisation (PSO), the prime intelligence agency in Yemen.

“The possibility of inside help for such a mass escape from the tightly guarded prison raises the question whether the state security services harbour agents sympathetic to Al-Qaeda,” a security official told IPS.

“It could not have happened without the involvement of high-ranking officers in the intelligence,” another senior official said on condition of anonymity.

Hundreds of Yemenis who fought in the 1980s against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan were given jobs with the security services when they returned. “It is not surprising that many of these former fighters are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda,” he said.

The convicts are suspected to have been helped by powerful groups after their escape. “How could they hide in just a few hours,” Hamid Bagash, head of a police office in Sana’a told IPS. “I think they got hep from as many associates outside the prison as from inside.”

But the perception of powerful help has given rise to theories also that the escape was official engineered in order to hand the suspects over to U.S. authorities.

“There are fears that what has happened was smuggling of militants wanted by the United States,” Khalid Al-Anesi, executive director of the National Organisation for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD) said in a statement.

There is no convincing explanation how the convicts could have got hold of the tools to dig such a long tunnel, he said.

The Imam at the mosque next to the prison said he had alerted the authorities that he had heard sounds of digging. “They did not believe me, but after the escape they detained me for three days,” Imam Riyadh Al-Ghaili told IPS.

According to official statements, Yemeni security forces have been searching the mountains and the countryside for the escaped convicts.

The United States has called the escape a major setback. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it is getting help from the Yemeni government.

“We are closely monitoring the situation at this time and we will work with our domestic and international partners to actively pursue these dangerous terrorists through the means we have available,” the FBI said in a statement.