DUBAI, April 27, (Agencies): Radical US-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki has appeared in a video apparently produced by al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based arm, confirming his ties with the organisation, a monitoring group said on Tuesday.
“While (Awlaki) had been supportive of groups in the past, he has until now never been publicly connected to a group through its official messages,” US monitoring group IntelCenter said.
The video “release firmly ties Awlaki to AQAP (al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula),” IntelCenter said.
The footage appears “authentic and bears the markings of AQAP’s official video arm, Al-Malahim Media,” the group said.
Qatar based Al-Jazeera television reported on its website on Tuesday that Awlaki, whose killing has been approved by Washington, in the video accused the US administration of trying to sow sedition in Yemen.
Al-Jazeera said he accused the United States of planning to create “Sahwa” or local tribal militias, the Arabic name for US-backed “Awakening” forces formed by Sunni tribesmen in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda.
“The people of the country would then fight each other, and the Americans would watch them,” an article on the satellite channel’s website quoted Awlaki as saying in the video.
Awlaki also praised Major Nidal Hasan, a US Army psychiatrist accused of opening fire on colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13, and Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.
“I am honoured to have people like Nidal Hasan as my students, while brother Umar Farouk is also one of my students, and I am honoured,” he said.
According to Al-Jazeera, Awlaki also said that US Central Command chief General David Petraeus had visited Yemen “to deal with a certain reality in the Muslim world after the US army had difficult experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The general, who was formerly the top US commander in Iraq, visited the country in early January.
Awlaki added that on Petraeus’ recommendation, Washington aims to attribute “to the mujahedeen (holy warriors) acts such as bombings in markets in which Muslims are killed ... or assassinating certain officials and then saying they were killed by mujahedeen.”
A US counter-terrorism official told AFP in early April that President Barack Obama’s administration has authorised US forces to kill Awlaki.
The US-born cleric, now based in Yemen, rose to prominence last year after it emerged he had communicated extensively by email with Hasan.
Camp
A Nigerian man suspected of attempting to bomb a US-bound plane in December appeared to have attended a militant training course, according to a videotape said to have been made by al-Qaeda in Yemen.
The video, which also contains footage of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in an apparent martyr’s farewell, shows masked gunmen in a desert firing machine guns and rocket propelled grenades at targets including a small plane flying overhead.
“Your brotherhood of Muslims in the Arabian peninsula have the right to wage jihad because the enemy is in your country,” Abdulmutallab said on the tape, broadcast by ABC news shortly after a suspected al-Qaeda suicide bomber tried to kill Britain’s ambassador to Yemen on Monday.
“The enemy is in your country with its army of Jews, Christians and their agents,” he said in his message, apparently recorded ahead of the botched plane attack.
The video, along with a tape of a US-born Muslim cleric linked to al-Qaeda in Yemen that also surfaced on Monday, adds to mounting evidence on the strength of al-Qaeda’s foothold in the impoverished Arabian peninsula state.
Arrested
Yemeni police arrested dozens of al-Qaeda suspects in sweeps a day after a suicide bomber tried to kill Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, security officials said on Tuesday.
In Yemen’s turbulent north, three people were wounded as rebels exchanged fire with pro-government tribes who cut a main road to the capital.
Among those taken into custody, the officials said, were seven Yemenis who had close relations with the bomber, who died when he attacked the convoy of British Ambassador Tim Torlot on Monday.
The seven men, as well as the bomber, had all been arrested for suspected al-Qaeda ties following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on US targets, but were released after two years in prison, according to the officials.
Yemen has been battling al-Qaeda and other militant groups eroding its stability for years. The group’s regional wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is based in Yemen and has previously threatened and attacked embassies.
Monday’s attack “bore the hallmarks of al-Qaeda”, Yemen’s interior ministry said.
The bomber, identified by the ministry as Othman Ali al-Sulwi, was a 22-year-old Yemeni student from the southern town of Taizz. Sulwi was wearing an explosive belt when he threw himself at the ambassador’s convoy, the ministry said.
No embassy staff was hurt, but two security escorts and a bystander were wounded.
The British embassy will close to the public for at least the rest of the week, an embassy spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
Police were also detaining all people with unlicenced motor bikes, an interior ministry statement said. Arab television channels said Monday that police were searching for an unknown motorcylist who was at the scene of the suicide attack.
The father of the suicide bomber who targeted the British envoy in Yemen has said that he was jailed in the past over suspected links to al-Qaeda, a local news website said Tuesday.
Othman Ali Nouman al-Salawi “was in prison for two years over charges of belonging to al-Qaeda,” his father Nouman al-Salawi said according to Yemen News website.
“He continued to report to security,” he said, without specifying when he was behind bars.
Salawi, 22, hurled himself Monday at the convoy of the British ambassador in Sanaa, Timothy Torlot, detonating his explosive belt. His body was torn into pieces, while the envoy and his company escaped unscathed.
Three bystanders were lightly wounded.
The father said that Salawi, who lived in Taiz, south of Sanaa, used to be absent from home for periods of up to two months.
Yemen interior ministry said Monday that the attack on Torlot’s convoy carried the “fingerprints of al-Qaeda.”