Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh has arrived in Riyadh for treatment for wounds from a rocket attack, the Saudi royal court said early Sunday.
A late night report by Al Jazeera TV said Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has taken over as acting president and supreme commander of the armed forces of Yemen, Arab News reported Sunday.
“The Yemeni president has arrived along with officials and citizens who had received different injuries for treatment in Saudi Arabia,” the royal court said.
According to the statement, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah, responding to a request by the Yemeni government, sent a
specialized medical team to Sanaa on Saturday to conduct medical tests on Saleh and other officials and citizens who have suffered injuries as a result of different events that took place recently.
Saleh, his prime minister, two deputy prime ministers and the speakers of both parliamentary chambers, were injured when a rocket slammed into a mosque inside his presidential compound on Friday. Eleven guards died in the attack.
The medical team recommended that the president and his officials be taken to Saudi Arabia to complete their treatment, the statement said.
Saleh arrived at King Khalid Air Base in Riyadh Saturday midnight and was transferred to a military hospital, according to media reports.
Saleh, whose Saudi medical evacuation plane was met by a senior Saudi official, walked off the aircraft but had visible injuries on his neck, head and face, a source said.
The extent of Saleh’s injuries has been a matter of intense speculation, with Yemen’s Deputy Information Minister Abdu Al-Janadi saying the embattled president was in good condition and “there is no reason to transfer him outside the country.”
He told Al-Jazeera that bandages on Saleh’s head for burns and scrapes prevented him from appearing on television as government officials had
promised Friday night after the attack.
Sheik Mohammed Nagi Al-Shayef, a leader of the Saleh-allied Bakeel tribe, said he met with the president Saturday evening at the Defense Ministry compound in the capital.
“He suffered burns but they were not serious. He was burned on both hands, his face and head,” Al-Shayef told The Associated Press. He said Saleh also was hit by jagged pieces of wood that splintered from the mosque pulpit. There were about 200 people in the mosque when the rocket landed.
But sources close to Saleh were quoted by the BBC as saying the attack had left the president with a 7.6-cm long piece of shrapnel under his heart and second-degree burns to his chest and face.
Hours after the attack, Saleh delivered an audio address, his voice labored, but the images shown on Yemeni television Friday after the attack were old.
A secretary in Saleh’s office and a ruling party official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters, said Saleh spoke to the King Abdullah afterward.
