Islamabad(National Times): A pregnant Yemeni journalist was killed and her reporter husband wounded in a bomb attack on their car as they travelled to hospital for her to give birth, the husband and a security source said.
“An explosive device planted in the car of journalist Mahmud al-Atmi blew up as he was taking his wife Rasha Abdallah to hospital to deliver her baby,” the source from government forces told AFP.
The bombing took place in the southern city of Aden, the temporary seat of the Yemeni administration.
Abdallah, 27, also a journalist, and her husband had worked with a number of local and regional media outlets.
They have a two-year-old child.
There was no immediate claim for the bombing but Atmi said he suspected Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthi rebels of being behind the attack.
“They were trying to find out my home address,” he told AFP.
The Huthis seized the capital Sanaa in 2014, leading the internationally-recognized government to relocate to Aden and prompting intervention of a Saudi-led military coalition that supports it.
Tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, have been killed and millions displaced since the conflict erupted in 2014, in what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
At least 12 civilians, including children, were killed late last month in a car bomb blast near the airport of Aden.
The explosion came almost three weeks after six people were killed in a car-bomb attack that targeted Aden’s governor, who survived.
Aden is home to a separatist movement that last year precariously integrated into the central government, and both have long been aligned against the Huthi rebels in the grinding civil war.
Yemeni journalists have been among the casualties of the conflict.
Last year Nabil Hasan al-Quaety, a Yemeni journalist who contributed to AFP, was gunned down and killed, also in Aden.
The 34-year-old videographer and photographer, who also worked for other major news organisations in the region, was shot in his car by unknown assailants shortly after leaving his home.
