Attack on Westerners

last updated 8 January 2015

Marib, Yemen

A Yemeni gunman shot three Western oil workers and then killed himself at an oil rig in Yemen this week. The gunman, working at the site as a carpenter, suddenly took out a weapon and opened fire. Hunt Oil, the U.S. company drilling in the area, said an American and a Canadian were killed and another Canadian was wounded. A Yemeni employee was also killed. Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden’s family, has seen a rash of anti-Western attacks recently, some of them linked to al Qaida. A gunman killed three American missionaries there last December, and militants attacked a French oil tanker off the coast in October.