Yemen protests intensify

Protests spread across Yemen on Wednesday demanding an end to the president's three decades in power, and a demonstrator died in clashes with police in the south, witnesses and medical sources said.

In the southern port of Aden, residents said around 500 protesters had turned on police who fired in the air to disperse the crowd. Two men were injured by stray bullets and two others by tear gas. Mohammed Alwani, 21, died from a gunshot wound, doctors said.

Alwani was the first protester known by Reuters to have died in three weeks of protests that have grown increasingly violent.

"My boy has died, and I'm in mourning," Alwani's father told Reuters by telephone.

Angry protesters surrounded a police office in Aden and a few men who broke away from the crowd set ablaze a municipal building and several cars, residents told Reuters.

Foreign plot?

President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a US ally against al-Qaeda who has been in power of the fractious Arabian Peninsula State for 32 years, was quoted by Yemen's state news agency as saying unrest was a foreign plot to create chaos in Arab countries.

"There are plans to try and sink the region into a fervor of chaos and violence, and they have targeted the security of the region and stability of our countries," Saleh was quoted as saying in a phone call to Bahrain's king to express support for the Gulf Arab kingdom, which also facing intensifying protests.

Residents in Aden told Reuters that another six protesters were hurt in ongoing clashes, and police had again opened fire.

The threat of turmoil in Yemen, struggling to quash a resurgent wing of al-Qaeda and keep rebellions at bay in its north and south, pushed Saleh to say he would step down in 2013 and call for a national dialogue that the opposition accepted.

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