Blast kills four at Yemen tourist site

An explosion at a tourist site in southern Yemen killed four South Korean tourists and a Yemeni man yesterday, a Yemeni security official said.

He said police were investigating the cause of the blast, which injured three other South Koreans, in the city of Shibam in the southeastern province of Hadramout.

"Maybe it was a terrorist attack but it could also be remnants of dynamite from a mine going off," the official said.

He said the explosion occurred as the tourists visited the city dubbed the "Manhattan of the Desert", which boasts some of the region's tallest 16th century buildings.

In January 2008, two Belgian tourists were killed in Yemen in an attack blamed on al Qaeda-linked militants who have launched frequent attacks on government and Western targets, including the US embassy, a US warship and a French supertanker.

The Arabian Peninsula country, one of the poorest outside Africa, has been seen as a stronghold of Islamist militants.

In a separate development, authorities said they had arrested Abdullah al-Harbi, a Saudi man who was on a list of 85 suspected militants issued by Saudi Arabia in February.

The Saudi list was issued after al Qaeda's wing in Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral home, issued a video on the internet in which it changed its name to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, in an apparent attempt to revive the Islamic militant group in Saudi Arabia.