The higher security committee, in an official statement, said preliminary investigations “indicate that the criminal attack carries the marks of the Al-Qaeda terror network,” the state news agency Saba reported.
It said three women and a seven-year-old boy were also killed in the clashes between the building guards and the assailants.
Earlier in the day, medical sources told AFP that 10 security personnel and three women cleaners were killed and at least 12 other people wounded.
The statement said “terrorists” stormed the main gate of the building at around 0500 GMT on Saturday, using grenades and gunfire to attack guards, also shooting at women and children near the building.
It made no reference to reports by local officials that the assailants succeeded in freeing an unspecified number of suspected Al-Qaeda members from the security building.
Witnesses said the assailants “were seen leaving the building in a bus, taking people who had been detained there with them,” in what appeared to be a coordinated and well-planned operation.
There were no casualties among the attackers, the witnesses said. The security committee vowed that the “terrorists” will be chased and brought before justice.
Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, has witnessed numerous attacks claimed by Al-Qaeda on foreign missions, tourist sites and oil installations.
In October 2000, militants in an explosive-packed high-speed boat blew a hole in the side of American warship the USS Cole in Aden, killing 17 sailors.
Two years later, the French-registered 500,000-tonne supertanker Limburg was damaged by another bomb-laden boat in an attack also attributed to Al-Qaeda, in the southeast port of Ash-Shir, east of Aden.
Sanaa has intensified operations against the local Al-Qaeda franchise in the wake of the attempted December 24 bombing of a US airliner by a Nigerian believed to have been trained and supplied by AQAP.
The group has suffered setbacks amid US pressure on the government to crack down. But its presence threatens to turn Yemen into a base for training and plotting attacks, a senior US counter-terrorism official said in September.
Just this week, AQAP urged Yemen’s eastern tribes to rise against the government and threatened retaliation for alleged air strikes in the area, the US monitoring group SITE said on Friday.
“Allah willing, we will light up the ground with fire under the tyrants of infidelity in the regime of (Yemeni President) Ali (Abdullah) Saleh and his helpers, the agents of America,” SITE quoted the group as saying.
In late May, provincial official Jaber Ali al-Shabwani and four of his bodyguards were killed in an air strike in Marib province that reportedly targeted a wanted Al-Qaeda suspect.
A local official said Shabwani had been negotiating for the man’s surrender and had gone for talks at the farm targeted in the air strike.
Source: DOWN