Sanaa, Yemen - Seven Yemeni police were shot dead by followers of a rebel preacher killed last year by the army, in an attack on their patrol in Saada province of northwest Yemen, a local official said.
The policemen were killed by followers of Sheikh Hussein Badr Eddin al-Huthi, of the Faithful Youth organization, who attacked their patrol at dawn in Nushur, northeast of the town of Saada, the official told AFP, requesting anonymity.
Police and army units launched an offensive against the militants following the attack, but it was not immediately known if any of Huthi's followers were killed in the assault, in which heavy weapons were used.
The renewed violence came less than 10 days after Yemeni police shot dead three Huthi supporters during a clash in Saada.
Three prominent Faithful Youth members were killed and two others wounded on March 19 "when police attacked them as they tried to buy weapons and ammunition from a store," a local official told AFP at the time.
Witnesses said three policemen were injured in that clash, the first since the Yemeni government announced in September last year that the army had killed the radical Zaidi preacher, nearly three months after he started a rebellion in the mountainous northwest.
The uprising, near the border with Saudi Arabia, triggered clashes which left more than 400 people dead.
The Zaidi sect is a moderate Shiite Muslim sect dominant in northwest Yemen but in the minority in the mainly Sunni country.
The local official said after the March 19 incident that security forces had been hunting down members of the Faithful Youth organization, an offshoot of the Islamist opposition movement Al-Haq formed in 1992, after hundreds of detained Huthi followers "refused to drop their radical religious views".
"Security authorities in Saada detected underground movements by the remnants of the Faithful Youth organization in the past few days in the Nushur area... and in Saqin, near the Maran mountains" where last year's rebellion took place, the official said.
Authorities had offered a 10-million-rial (55,000-dollar) reward for information leading to the capture of Huthi, whom they accused of seeking to foment sectarian strife.
But Huthi told AFP last July the conflict was a result of his anti-US stand.
Huthi's top aide, Abdullah Ayedh al-Razami, was reported by officials to have surrendered to authorities along with dozens of supporters 10 days after the announcement of his death.
They turned themselves in in Saada, where they had been besieged by army troops for more than two months.