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ADEN // Seventeen people, including four Catholic nuns, were
killed in Aden on Friday morning when armed men attacked a care home
for the elderly run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity.
Six
Ethiopians, a Yemeni cook and Yemeni guards were also killed, said
Khaled Haidar, whose brother Radwan was among the dead. He said his
family was the first to arrive at the home in Aden’s Al Sheikh Othman
district following the attack.
It was not yet clear who was
responsible for the killings, but ISIL and Al Qaeda have carried out a
string of attacks in the southern Yemeni city in recent months.
An Aden security official told
The National
that four extremist militants had knocked on the door of the home and
told the guard that they wanted to visit their mother who was a
resident.
“When the guard opened the door [the militants] burst
in and killed the guard ... [before] ... firing on the elderly
[residents] and Indian nuns at random,” the official said.
He said one Indian nun had survived by hiding inside a cold room used to store medicines.
Mr
Haidar said he had spoken to the nun, who was crying and shaking. His
family handed her over to resistance fighters responsible for security
in Al Sheikh Othman district, he added.
The dead and injured were
taken to the city’s state-run Republican hospital and a health centre
run by Medecins Sans Frontieres.
A doctor at the Republican hospital told
The National that some of the dead had arrived with their hands tied behind their backs. Most had been shot in the head.
Paramedics said they expected the death toll to rise as some of the wounded had serious injuries.
Officials and medics were unable to provide a figure for the number of people injured in the attack.
There
were about 80 elderly residents at the home, which was established in
2000 by Missionaries of Charity, a religious order set up by Mother
Teresa.
Sunita Kumar, a spokeswoman for the order in the Indian
city of Kolkata, said its members were “absolutely stunned” at the
killing.
“The sisters were to come back but they opted to stay on to serve people” in Yemen, she said.
She said that two of the nuns killed were from Rwanda and the other two were from India and Kenya.
Missionaries
of Charity, which also runs homes for the elderly in Taez, Hodeidah and
Sanaa, is the only organisation to provide such a service in Yemen.
Friday’s
attack was not the first on the order in Yemen. In 1998, three of its
nuns were shot dead in the Red Sea port of Hodeidah by a psychiatric
patient who had volunteered to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims in 1992
before returning to Yemen.
Local religious leader Sheikh Mohammed Mahboob blamed the Aden attack on ISIL, which considers Christians to be heretics.
“The Islamic State fighters have a wrong understanding of Islam,” he said.
ISIL
and Al Qaeda have been gaining ground in Aden in recent months and are
now active in several neighbourhoods. Previous extremist attacks in the
city have tended to target government officials and the security forces,
however.
With Sanaa still in the hands of Yemen’s Houthi rebels
and their allies, who seized the city in September 2014, president
Abdrabu Mansur Hadi has declared Aden to be the country’s temporary
capital.
