SANAA, Yemen (AP) — A car bomb that rocked Yemen’s southern port city of Aden this week and killed a major general also took the life of his son, a junior military officer, and three guards, a media spokesman said Thursday.
The bombing on Wednesday targeted the convoy of Maj. Gen. Thabet Jawas, a senior commander in southern Yemen, who was killed. Initial reports said at least four others also died.
No one has so far claimed responsibility for the attack in Aden. The city has been rocked by several bombings in recent years blamed on local affiliates of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have also targeted the city with ballistic missiles and explosives-laden drones.
On Thursday, Qaed Nasr, a military spokesman for Jawas’ division, said that the major general’s son, Nabil Jawas, a 26-year-old military officer who was accompanying his father, also died.
The two were driving home after attending a relative’s funeral when a parked car exploded as Jawas’ convoy passed near a fuel supply facility, according to security officials speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.
Three guards were also killed, the officials said, while five civilian passers-by who were wounded in the bombing are in hospital and getting medical treatment.
Images from the scene showed fire with charred bodies on the ground. An investigation was underway.
Aden has been the seat of Yemen’s internationally recognized government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi since the Houthis seized the country’s capital, Sanaa, in 2014, triggering the country’s protracted civil war.
Hadi and his prime minister, Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed, mourned Jawas’ death and denounced the bombing as a “terrorist attack.”
