Car bomb in Yemeni port city kills four, injures others: witnesses

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The four men killed were guards for Brigadier General Shalal Ali Shayyeh, who survived a car bomb attack on his convoy on Jan. 4 amid an escalating wave of assassinations against security forces in the city.

The government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has been grappling with lawlessness there since militiamen, backed by a Saudi-led Arab military alliance, drove the Iran-allied Houthi group out in July.

Yemen descended into a civil war last March when the Houthis forced Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia after they closed in on Aden, drawing a Saudi-led coalition into the Yemen conflict.

Alliance and anti-Houthi forced seized Aden from the Houthis over the summer but have yet to impose control on the city where militants and other gunmen have a prominent presence.

In a rare security incident in the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa, gunmen on a motorbike also shot dead a police colonel.

Ground fighting and air strikes have killed around 6,000 people during the nine-month war in impoverished Yemen. The United Nations estimates about half that number are civilians.

A local official in the village of Bilad al-Rus outside Sanaa said a prominent local journalist, Almigdad Mojalli, was killed in a Saudi-led air strike on Sunday.

Mojalli, a reporter for several Western and international news outlets, died while investigating the site of a mineral bath that residents said was hit by coalition planes last week, killing 15 civilians.

(Reporting By Mohammed Mukhashaf and Mohammed Ghobari; Writing by Noah Browning; Editing by Richard Balmforth)