Al-Qaida link suspected in Baptists' deaths

Experts say the shooting could be seen partly as a backlash against the Yemeni government for supporting the U.S. war on terrorism.
JIBLA, Yemen (AP) -- Yemeni interrogators suspect the man accused of killing three American missionaries at a Baptist hospital may have ties to Al-Qaida, officials said today, as U.S. investigators joined the search for those behind the murders.
Two of the slain Americans were buried today in the southern Yemeni town of Jibla, where each had worked for more than two decades and where the attack took place. The third was to be flown back to the United States.
An FBI team arrived Monday in Jibla and worked overnight. An American diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not say whether U.S. investigators were being allowed to directly question the suspect arrested in the slayings, but said the Americans "are very close" to the interrogation.
In past investigations of attacks on Americans here, Americans working alongside Yemenis have complained of having limited access to suspects.
The U.S. Embassy said it was too early to tell if terrorism was behind Monday's shootings at a Southern Baptist hospital. But Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul-Kader Bajammal included the slayings in a list of terrorist acts he presented to parliament later in the day.
Possible link to bin Laden
Officials close to the investigation said Yemeni interrogators have strong suspicions the accused gunman has connections to Osama bin Laden's terror network. Yemen is bin Laden's ancestral homeland and has been a fertile recruiting ground for him.
Yemen has been a key front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism and its government signed on as Washington's partner after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the attack, the gunman slipped past security at Jibla Baptist Hospital, 125 miles south of the capital San'a, opened fire at about 8:15 a.m. Monday, officials and witnesses said.
After shooting three people in the head, killing them instantly, the gunman headed to the pharmacy and shot the pharmacist in the abdomen. Yemeni authorities arrested a Yemeni suspect they identified as 30-year-old Abed Abdul Razak Kamel.
Victims
The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention identified the dead as purchasing agent Kathleen A. Gariety, 53, of Wauwatosa, Wis.; Dr. Martha C. Myers, 57, of Montgomery, Ala.; and hospital director William E. Koehn, 60, of Arlington, Texas.
Myers -- who had worked in Yemen for 24 years -- and Koehn -- who had planned to retire next October after 28 years at the hospital -- were buried in Jibla today. Gariety's body was to be flown to the United States.
Pharmacist Donald W. Caswell, 49, of Levelland, Texas, was recovering from surgery, his father said.
The 80-bed Jibla hospital, which sits on a hilltop amid trees, treats more than 40,000 patients annually, providing care free to the poor. Hospital officials said the staff included 64 foreigners, including 25 Americans.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh condemned the shootings as "criminal and disgraceful" in a message to President Bush and said they would "strengthen our determination to eradicate terrorism," the official news agency Saba reported.
In addition to interrogating the suspect, investigators were questioning prisoners picked up in earlier sweeps of suspected Muslim militants to see what they knew about Kamel. The suspects included some believed linked to Al-Qaida and some to a small Yemeni group known as al-Jihad.
Al-Jihad, which attracted many Yemenis who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, had chiefly targeted secular figures from once-socialist southern Yemen. It had not been active for several years.
Seen as backlash
Earlier, officials had said Kamel claimed to have ties to a cell plotting attacks on foreigners and secular-minded politicians. The shootings are being seen as the start of a backlash against Yemeni cooperation with the U.S. "war on terror."
In recent months, the United States has extended its military reach deep within this mountainous desert country, searching for Islamic militants sheltered by its harsh terrain and limited central government.
Although Al-Qaida sympathizers have promised to retaliate, Sunday's attack is the most dramatic targeting of American civilians in the region since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
"This kind of action will be part of the fallout from our much closer relations with the Yemeni government," says Charles Dunbar, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Simmons College in Boston and a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen. Noting that the suspected gunman told police he had been coordinating his act with a gunman who killed a prominent Yemeni leftist politician over the weekend, Professor Dunbar says, "If that's true, this can be seen not just as a lashing out against America and Americans, but against foreign ideologies, religious or secular."
The object of this attack was both a Christian hospital and the closer U.S.-Yemeni relations, says Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and a Yemen specialist at New York University. "Every one of these attacks, whether it hits people or a [French] supertanker off the coast [bombed in October], is targeting our alliance with the Yemeni government as much as Americans."
Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.