ADEN: Gunmen attacked an old people’s home in the Yemeni port of Aden on Friday, killing at least 15 people, including four Christian nuns from India, local officials and medical sources said.
The four attackers told a guard they were on a visit to their mother, then stormed into the home and opened fire with rifles, an official said. As well as the nuns, the dead included two Yemeni women staff, eight elderly residents and a guard.
The motive of the gunmen was not immediately known. They fled after the attack, the official said.
“These terrorist acts have continued and have touched the innocent, the peaceful, the unarmed and religious figures,” the state news agency Saba said, quoting a source in the Aden office of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Their aim was to “create chaos,” it added.
The bodies of the dead were taken to a clinic supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres, medical sources said.
Once a cosmopolitan city home to thriving Hindu and Christian communities, Aden has gone from being one of the world’s busiest ports as a hub of the British empire to a backwater and then in recent months to a conflict zone.
Aden’s small Christian population left long ago. Unknown assailants have in the past vandalized a Christian cemetery and last year blew up an abandoned Catholic church.
The four attackers told a guard they were on a visit to their mother, then stormed into the home and opened fire with rifles, an official said. As well as the nuns, the dead included two Yemeni women staff, eight elderly residents and a guard.
The motive of the gunmen was not immediately known. They fled after the attack, the official said.
“These terrorist acts have continued and have touched the innocent, the peaceful, the unarmed and religious figures,” the state news agency Saba said, quoting a source in the Aden office of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Their aim was to “create chaos,” it added.
The bodies of the dead were taken to a clinic supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres, medical sources said.
Once a cosmopolitan city home to thriving Hindu and Christian communities, Aden has gone from being one of the world’s busiest ports as a hub of the British empire to a backwater and then in recent months to a conflict zone.
Aden’s small Christian population left long ago. Unknown assailants have in the past vandalized a Christian cemetery and last year blew up an abandoned Catholic church.
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