23 Yemeni soldiers killed by Shiite rebels

AFP - Shiite rebels killed 23 Yemeni soldiers in twin attacks in the northern mountains as tentative feelers to end six years of fighting faltered, tribal and rebel sources said on Saturday.

Rebels ambushed a military supply convoy in Wadi al-Jabara district on the road between the province of Saada on the Saudi border and Al-Jawf province farther east, killing 15 soldiers on Friday, tribal chiefs said.

Rebel fighters killed another eight soldiers in clashes on Friday in Saada town, the rebels said on their website.

A military source confirmed that rebels had launched an offensive against the town from the suburbs, but said it had been repulsed and that several rebel fighters had been killed.

The rebels also attacked the home of a leading trial chief in Saada province, Othman Mujalli, who is a member of the Yemeni parliament and recently rallied to the government, provincial officials said.

Mortar fire killed Mujalli's son, Hamid, and four other civilians, they said.

The clashes came as truce offers between the two sides stuttered over continued military action by Saudi forces which intervened in the fighting late last year.

At the end of last month, the rebels offered to accept the government's five-point truce terms if it halted attacks.

But the government rejected the offer, saying the rebels had failed to accept a key condition: a promise to stop attacking Saudi territory.

The rebels say they have withdrawn from all of the Saudi territory that they occupied in December but are continuing to come under Saudi attack inside Yemen.

A statement on the rebels' website on Thursday said that Saudi air raids had killed 14 people, including women and children.

The new fighting came as a Yemeni court handed down a 15-year jail sentence against the fugitive brother of Shiite rebel leader Abdul Malak al-Huthi after convicting him of carrying out acts of terror.

The court found Yahia al-Huthi guilty in absentia of plotting the murders of important figures, including the American ambassador in Sanaa.

It also convicted him of being in a terrorist organisation, assaulting the constitutional order, disseminating tendentious information and contacts with foreign powers.

Huthi, who has fled to Germany, was elected to parliament in 2003 on the ticket of the General People's Congress of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but his parliamentary immunity was lifted late last year.

His brother heads the Zaidi Shiite rebels who have been fighting Yemeni troops in the northern mountains since 2004.

An offshoot of Shiite Islam, the Zaidis form the majority community in the north but are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen. The president is himself a Zaidi.

The rebels launched a major offensive in 2008 in which its fighters advanced to just 10 kilometres (six miles) from the capital. Since April last year, authorities have held a string of trials of some 190 rebels captured during that fighting.