December 12, 2014
A car bomb at the Iranian ambassador’s residence in Yemen killed three people last Wednesday, but none of them were Iranians.
The attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda militants who oppose Iran and the Yemeni Shiite rebels who now occupy the capital, Sanaa.
The bombing was one in a series of recent explosions claimed by Al-Qaeda. In the week after the bombing at the ambassador’s home, bombs went off outside the homes of three leading Shiite rebel leaders in the city. No one was killed but several people were injured.
The bombing at the Iranian ambassador’s residence blew a large hole in the residence and sent rubble flying across the street of the well-guarded diplomatic quarter of the city, a witness told the Reuters news agency.
A Yemeni civilian—the son of the ambassador’s Yemeni bodyguard—and two soldiers were killed, officials said. Seventeen people, mostly employees at a nearby Oil Ministry building, were injured.
The ambassador had left his residence for the embassy 10 minutes before the bomb went off, security officials said.
In Tehran, Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif was quoted as saying the Yemeni government is duty bound under international law to protect diplomatic buildings, an accurate if strange point to be made by a government that held 52 American diplomats hostage in 1979-81 and that withdrew police from outside the British embassy in 2011 so mobs could overrun it.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) claimed responsibility on its Twitter account. It said its fighters parked a car with the bomb and left the scene, killing several Iranian employees and local guards. Security officials, however, said it was a suicide attack and no Iranian staffers were harmed.
Iran backs the Houthi rebel movement that seized Sanaa in September and has since taken swathes of the country’s north and center.
Iranian diplomats have been targeted in Yemen before. One diplomat is being held hostage by suspected Sunni militants and another was killed earlier this year when he resisted a kidnaping attempt.
