SANAA, Oct 8, (Agencies): A young security guard who shot dead a Frenchman in Yemen this week appears to have acted for personal and criminal reasons, the Yemeni defence ministry said on Friday.
Jacques Spagnolo, a contractor working for Austrian energy group OMV, was shot at the company’s compound in the Yemeni capital on Wednesday, the same day a British embassy car was targeted by a rocket attack that wounded one person.
“It is probable that the murder of the Frenchman ... was for personal reasons and that it was of a criminal nature,” the ministry said on its website, without elaborating.
“These conclusions are preliminary, as the inquest against security guard Hisham Mohammed Assem, 19, is still in its early stages,” the statement added.
A 65-year-old Scot, said to be OMV’s security chief, was also wounded in the attack, the statement said.
On Wednesday, “the armed guard opened fire on the director, crying Allahu Akbar (God is greatest),” a security official said.
OMV confirmed that a French contractor who was working for the company as a procurement officer died in hospital.
It added that a British national, described as an expert who worked at the company’s branch office, was wounded in the attack.
At the time, the Austrian firm said it saw “no political background for the action taken by the Yemeni security guard.”

The man, who was guarding the company’s Yemen headquarters in Haddah, on the outskirts of Sanaa, was disarmed and arrested.
The Austrian group has had a sizeable presence in Yemen since it acquired the German firm Preussag Energie in 2003, with three large exploration and production licences and daily oil output of around 6,500 barrels per day.
In July, al-Qaeda militants launched an attack near one of the OMV-operated oil fields in the southeastern Shabwa province, which killed six soldiers and two jihadists.
Yemen, the poorest country in the Arabian peninsula and the ancestral homeland of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s, faces a growing threat from the local branch of the jihadist network. Yemeni security sources said earlier this week initial indications were that al-Qaeda militants were behind the attack as well as the firing of a rocket-propelled grenade also on Monday at a British diplomat’s car in Sanaa.
“First investigations with the accused show it likely that ... the crime was committed out of personal motives,” an interior ministry statement on government website “26 September” said (www.26sep.net).

“This conclusion is only preliminary and not a final verdict since the investigations are just at the beginning,” it added.
The statement named the guard as Hisham Mohammed Mohammed Assem, a 19-year-old from the Taizz province who lives in Sanaa.
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), an arm of al-Qaeda thought to be include mainly Yemenis and Saudis, has not issued any claim of responsibility for either attack. An al-Qaeda suicide bomber to kill the British ambassador in April.
AQAP has struck more often at Yemeni and Western targets since Sanaa declared “war” on the group, with US support, after it claimed a failed US airliner bombing in December.

Occasional American missile strikes to back the crackdown have sometimes killed civilians as well as militants — an embarrassment to a government aware of the fiercely anti-US sentiments of many Yemenis in a Muslim country awash with guns.
Analysts say Yemen’s government, also facing southern secessionists and northern Shiite rebels, is keen to benefit from Western backing and show that Yemen is paying dearly for its sometimes questioned commitment to combating al-Qaeda.
A government website said on Tuesday that Yemen had lost $12 billion in tourism and investment since al-Qaeda bombed a US warship in Aden harbour in 2000, killing 17 sailors.
It said the security forces had lost 64 dead in fighting with al-Qaeda since a crackdown began in mid-August.
More than two in five Yemen’s 23 million people live on less than $2 a day. A third do not have enough food for their needs, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute.