Sana'a, Yemen  - Four soldiers were wounded in a clash with armed tribesmen in the north-western Yemeni province of Amran on Thursday, local sources said.

The sources said the shootout broke out after security forces tried to capture gunmen besieging a local government building in the Harf Sufian district of Amran.

Harf Sufian, about 150 kilometres north-west of the capital Sana'a, is on the main road linking Sana'a with the restive Saada province where skirmishes between the army and Shiite rebels have been raging on and off since 2004.

It was not immediately clear whether the gunmen were members of the Shiite rebel group.

Sana'a, Yemen  - Unknown armed men kidnapped two Japanese women tourists in the north-central province of Marib on Wednesday, security sources said.

Sana'a, Yemen  - The number of refuge-seekers arriving on the Yemeni coasts on smugglers' boats from Somalia increased massively in the past four months as conflict continues to plague the Horn of Africa country, a UN refugee agency said Tuesday

By April 20, more than 15,300 people arrived in Yemen on 324 boats, and 361 people were killed or missing during those hazardous voyages, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a statement.

Sana'a, Yemen  - A French engineer appeared in a court in the Yemeni capital Sana'a on Monday to face the charge of attempting to smuggle ancient artefacts.

The 58-year-old Frenchman, whose name was withheld pending the verdict, was arrested at Sana'a international airport on Thursday after customs officers discovered 31 antiquities in his luggage as he was departing for Paris, prosecutors said.

The seized artefacts included eight bronze statuettes, five fake stone statuettes, 15 ancient coins and three stone stamps, they said.

Sana'a, Yemen- A new round of talks between representatives of
Yemeni authorities and Shiite rebels began in the north-western Yemeni
province of Saada on Monday to revive a fragile ceasefire, a senior
negotiator said.

Ali Abu-Hulaiqa, who heads a Yemeni-Qatari committee entrusted with
enforcing a Qatari-sponsored ceasefire deal, said the committee met
with rebel negotiators to set a new timetable for implementing the
agreement.

"We met their (the rebels) representatives and discussed a weekly
procedural agenda," Abu-Hulaiqa told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa by
telephone from Saada, some 230 kilometres north of Sana'a.

Sana'a, Yemen  -  At least seven people, including three soldiers, were killed in fierce fighting between government forces and Shiite rebels in northern Yemen on Saturday, a day after a bomb attac