Blast at Yemen airport kills dozens, wounds more than 100

AP footage from the scene at the airport showed members of the government delegation disembarking as the blast shook the grounds. Many ministers rushed back inside the plane or ran down the stairs, seeking shelter.

Thick smoke rose into the air from near the terminal building. Officials at the scene said they saw bodies lying on the tarmac and elsewhere at the airport.

Yemeni Communication Minister Naguib al-Awg, who was on the plane, told the AP that he heard two explosions, suggesting they were drone attacks. Prime Minister Maeen Abdulmalik Saeed and the others were quickly whisked from the airport to the Mashiq Palace.

Military and security forces sealed off the area around the the palace.

“It would have been a disaster if the plane was bombed,” al-Awg said, insisting the plane was the target of the attack as it was supposed to land earlier.

Prime Minister Saeed tweeted that he and his Cabinet were safe and unhurt. He called the explosions a “cowardly terrorist act” that was part of the war on “the Yemeni state and our great people.”

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Foreign Minister Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak blamed the Houthis for the attacks. His ministry said in a statement later that the rebels fired four ballistic missiles at the airport, and launched drone attacks at the palace, the Cabinet’s headquarters. They did not provide evidence.

Health Minister Qasem Buhaibuh said in a tweet the attacks at the airport killed least 25 people and wounded 110 others, suggesting the death toll could increase further because some of the wounds were serious.

Images shared on social media from the scene showed rubble and broken glass strewn about near the airport building and at least two lifeless bodies, one of them charred, lying on the ground. In another image, a man tries to help another man whose clothes were torn to get up from the ground.

Anwar Gargash, the United Arab Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs, said the attack on Aden’s airport was meant to destroy the power-sharing deal between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the southern separatists.

US Ambassador in Yemen Christopher Henzel said the US condemned the attacks in Aden. “We stand with the Yemeni people as they strive for peace, and we support the new Yemeni Government as it works towards a better future for all Yemenis,” he said.

Egypt, Jordan and other Arab and Western nations also condemned the airport attack.

The Yemeni ministers were returning to Aden from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, after being sworn in last week as part of a reshuffle following a deal with the separatists. Yemen’s internationally recognised government has worked mostly from self-imposed exile in Riyadh during the country’s years-long civil war.

The Saudi ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed al-Jaber, described the attack as a “cowardly terrorist act targeting the Yemeni people, their security and stability.”

Despite “the disappointment and confusion caused by those who create death and destruction,” the peace agreement between the government and southern separatists “will go forward,” he said.

Hadi, in exile in Saudi Arabia, announced the Cabinet reshuffle earlier this month.

Naming a new government was part of a power-sharing deal between the Saudi-backed Hadi and the Emirati-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council, an umbrella group of militias seeking to restore an independent southern Yemen, which existed from 1967 until unification in 1990.