Yemen Car Bomb Blast Kills 8

A suicide bomber killed eight people Monday when he drove his car into the site of the ancient Queen of Sheba temple in northeast Yemen, police said.

Police in the province of Mareb said the suicide car bomb explosion also wounded seven other people. Six of the people killed were tourists, believed to be mostly from Spain. The other two were Yemenis, police said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Witnesses reported seeing a car enter a gate before exploding at the site of temple, which is known in Yemen by its Arabic name, Balqis. The temple was built about 3,000 years ago at the time of the ancient Queen of Sheba.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but police in Mareb said they had received information last month about a possible al Qaeda attack. Authorities did not elaborate.

Al Qaeda has an active presence in Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, despite government efforts to fight the terror network. Al Qaeda was blamed for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden that killed 17 American sailors and the attack on a French oil tanker that killed one person two years later.

Yemen was a haven for Islamists from across the Arab world during the 1990s, but after the Sept. 11 attacks, it declared support for the U.S. campaign against international terrorism.

But its crackdown on militants has suffered a number of setbacks, such as the February 2006 prison breakout of 23 convicts — some of whom had been jailed for al Qaeda-linked crimes.

Foreign interests in Yemen often face low-level threats and foreign tourists are frequently kidnapped by tribes seeking to win concessions from the government, either better services or the release of jailed relatives. Most of the hostages have been released unharmed.