Four Yemeni soldiers killed in southern attack

Armed militants killed four Yemeni soldiers in an attack on a checkpoint in the south of the Arab country on Saturday, a local official said, a day after 12 soldiers were killed in a suspected al-Qaeda ambush.

Six soldiers were also wounded in the attack in the southern province of Lahj, the official told Reuters.

Militants from the Southern Movement opened fire on the checkpoint in the area of al-Milah, close to the town of Habilayn which has been under the control of southern gunmen for weeks, the official told AFP.

Sources in the movement confirmed the attack, adding one assailant was wounded by army fire and taken into hospital in Habilayn.

Eight soldiers were also injured on Saturday when their vehicle came under fire in the southern city of Lawdar, the site of Friday's suspected al-Qaeda ambush which killed 12 soldiers, another local official said.

Yemen is trying to quell a resurgent wing of al-Qaeda that has stepped up attacks on Western and regional targets in the poor Arabian Peninsula state, a neighbor of oil giant Saudi Arabia.

Yemen also faces growing separatist militancy in the south while it tries to maintain a shaky truce with Shi'ite rebels in the north.

The country is a focus of Western security concerns after two U.S.-bound parcel bombs were intercepted in Britain and Dubai in October, a plot claimed by al-Qaeda's Yemen-based regional wing.

Meanwhile, tribal mediation has secured the release of an intelligence major and three other northerners that were kidnapped by southern militants in Lahij on Thursday, the head of local government Hassan al-Hoshabi said.

The four were taken hostage in the al-Mussaymir area in retaliation for the authorities' hunt for southern activist Abdullah Raweh.

South Yemen was independent from the 1967 British withdrawal from Aden until the region united with the north in 1990.

The south seceded in 1994, sparking a short-lived civil war that ended with it being overrun by northern troops.