The attacks bore the hallmarks of Al-Qaeda, which has threatened to strike against Western targets and the Yemeni government, which declared war on the group’s local arm after it claimed a failed attack on a US-bound airliner in December.

In London, the British Foreign Office said a missile was fired at a British embassy vehicle in Sanaa carrying the deputy chief of the British mission and one British embassy staff member in the vehicle suffered a minor injury.

“The vehicle was on its way to the British embassy, with five embassy staff on board,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.

“One member of staff suffered minor injuries and is undergoing treatment, all others were unhurt.”

A security source in Yemen said three Yemeni bystanders were wounded. President Ali Abdullah Saleh later met the British ambassador to discuss the incident.

The Frenchman died in a shooting incident inside the compound of Austrian-owned oil and gas group OMV, France’s Foreign Ministry said. A security source said a Yemeni guard working for a private security firm went on a shooting spree, and government forces subsequently disarmed him.

In London, Foreign Secretary William Hague called it a “shameful attack.” He said the attack would only reinforce Britain’s determination to help Yemen confront its challenges.

Both attacks followed tightened security in the capital of the embattled country whose conflicts with a resurgent Al-Qaeda, secessionists in the south and Shiite rebels in the north has raised Western and Gulf Arab fears it is on the verge of becoming a failed state.

Those fears worsened after the Yemen-based arm of Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the botched bombing of the US-bound airliner. The group also said it was behind a failed assassination attempt on the deputy interior minister of Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s neighbor and the world’s top oil exporter.

An Al-Qaeda suicide bomber attacked the British ambassador’s convoy in April, killing himself and injuring three others.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said it was behind that attack, accusing the British envoy of leading a war on Muslims in the peninsula.

Yemen’s population of unemployed youths are seen as potential recruits for Islamist fighters, and Western donor nations including Britain backed Yemen in its fight against Al-Qaeda at a United Nations meeting in New York last month.

More than 40 percent of Yemen’s 23 million people live on less than $2 a day, and concerns about instability and corruption have hampered growth and made unemployment worse.

The mountainous country, facing the Horn of Africa, could run out of oil reserves within a decade and water resources are depleted. It has introduced some fuel subsidy reforms as it struggles to reduce high fiscal deficits.
 

Yemen is the ancestral home of Al-Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden, who is thought to be in hiding somewhere in the border area of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Analysts say Yemenis have long formed a significant body of Al-Qaeda footsoldiers abroad.

Al Qaeda in Yemen announced last year that Yemen was the base for its Saudi and other Gulf operations. It stepped up attacks this year in apparent reprisal for the government’s increased collaboration with the United States.

Yemen’s Western allies and Saudi Arabia have long feared a resurgent Al-Qaeda wing could take advantage of rising insecurity and weak central control to use Yemen as a base for attacks that would destabilise the region and beyond.

The failed airliner bombing prompted Washington to step up training, intelligence and military aid to Sanaa. Yemen cooperated with Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001 to stamp out the group’s presence.

Suspected US drones — unmanned aircraft also used against militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — have been criticized by rights watchdog Amnesty International as extrajudicial killings. In the most recent attacks attributed by the government to Al-Qaeda, gunmen opened fire on security forces in Sanaa on Sept. 25, injuring several people.

That month Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) also distributed a statement threatening to kill 54 name security officials in Abyan province and series of other incidents were reported by official sources in Abyan and Lahj provinces.

Al Qaeda and the Yemeni government have clashed for many years, but the group’s operations have typically focused on Western targets.

An Al-Qaeda attack on the US embassy in Sanaa in 2008 killed 16 people, including six attackers.