The ministry gave no further details about the release, but it had said last month that the tribesmen held the sailors to press the government into releasing a tribesman held by the authorities.
In a separate incident, an Oil Ministry official said Islamist militants fired at a team of engineers as they attempted to fix an oil pipeline that the militants blew up on Monday. One person was injured in the attack.
Just over a month after former President Ali Abdullah Saleh quit office under a power-transfer deal, security in much of the country is shaky, with Islamists militants in the south controlling swathes of territory, and the military - which split after mass protests against Saleh last year - remains divided.
The Yemeni capital itself is split between rival forces, including those controlled by renegade general Ali Mohsen Al-Ahmar and the Republican Guard, commanded by Saleh’s son Ahmed, and saw bouts of open warfare in May and September.
A military committee tasked with restructuring the armed forces is to ensure feuding factions evacuate the streets of Sanaa and remove checkpoints, but there has been little progress toward that goal.
