What other Al Qaeda-linked attacks have involved Yemen?

2. US Embassy car bomb attack. On Sept. 17, 2008, a suicide car bomb narrowly missed doing severe damage to the US Embassy in Sanaa. Six attackers dressed as policemen opened fire on guards from another vehicle and sought to maneuver the car bomb into position. The firefight with Yemeni police stopped them short of their goal. Six Yemeni police, the six attackers, and at least four bystanders were killed in the incident. Within days, the Yemeni government arrested more than a dozen men it said helped organize the attack and said they were affiliated with Al Qaeda.

3. Limburg oil tanker attack. On Oct. 6, 2002, an explosives-laden boat intercepted the French tanker as it steamed through the Gulf of Aden, an attack that mirrored the tactics used to strike the USS Cole. One sailor was murdered in the incident, and the ship spilled almost 100,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf. International shippers avoided Yemen's main port, Aden, for some months after the attack., for which Al Qaeda claimed credit. At least one of the men sentenced for his participation in the attack later escaped the heavily guarded jail in Sanaa that Mr. Badawi also escaped from.

4. Failed US Embassy attack. In June 2001, Yemeni police arrested a group of men near the US Embassy with explosives and maps of the area. They were later convicted along with others defendants in trials that found they were members of Al Qaeda and seeking to carry out terrorist attacks. At the trial, which also convicted Al Qaeda operatives accused of involvement in the attack on the Limburg, an attack on a helicopter carrying employees of a US oil company, prosecutors said the men were involved in a plot to murder the US Ambassador Edmund Hull and were also hoping to strike three other embassies. A 2003 Al Qaeda attempt to truck-bomb the British Embassy in Sanaa was also foiled

5. USS Cole. The October 12, 2000, suicide attack by a small craft packed with explosives killed 17 sailors on the USS Cole, an American destroyer berthed in Aden harbor for a fuel stop. Osama bin Laden took credit for the attack in a video released shortly before the Sept.11 attack the following year. Though Yemen's initial response to the attack was robust, with a number of arrests and trials, every man arrested or convicted in connection with attack in Yemen has since either escaped from prison or been pardoned. Jamal al-Badawi, one of the senior leaders of the plot, escaped from prison twice. After his second escape, he turned himself in to Yemeni authorities in 2007 in a negotiated deal that ended with his release from prison in exchange for a promise of good behavior. At least two of the convicted attackers released from Yemeni custody later participated in suicide attacks in Iraq.

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