Wednesday’s Islamic terror attack at the office of a French satirical magazine that left 12 dead wasn’t even the biggest terror attack of the day: Terrorists detonating a car bomb at a police academy in Yemen killed as many as 40, with over 60 wounded.
“We found the top part of one person yelling, while his bottom half was completely severed,” a police spokesman told Reuters.
While no organization has claimed responsibility for the incident, the pattern of the attack matches al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror group’s local affiliate, which has repeatedly reaped carnage from Yemen’s continuing instability. (RELATED: 7 Foreign News Stories You Missed In 2014)
The police academy is located in a central part of the capital, Sanaa, near the central bank and Ministry of Defense. The victims included cadets, young men hoping to enroll and civilians.
The Yemeni army has been cooperating with the U.S. drone campaign against al-Qaida. The drone program has not been without its setbacks, most infamously killing 14 innocent civilians in a mistaken strike on a wedding party in late 2013, inflaming anti-American sentiment. The country has been in political turmoil since Arab Spring-inspired revolts in 2011, but conditions have markedly worsened since an Iran-backed Shiite militia, the Houthis, seized control of the capital in September.
Recent months have seen an acceleration in the trend of civilians caught on the front lines of the conflict between the government, the Houthis and al-Qaida.
The attack came less than a week after a similar attack last Thursday, in which a suicide bomber killed 26 people in the city of Ibb.
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