Yemen: Charlie Hebdo puts AQAP back in spotlight

Attention turned again to Yemen after Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) spokesman Nasser Bin Ali Al-Ansi claimed responsibility for the 7 January massacre at the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in a video released on 14 January by AQAP’s media arm Al-Malahim. Ansi’s claim that AQAP had planned the “blessed battle of Paris”, as he referred to the attack that left 12 people dead, tallied with the claims of the two attackers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi: Chérif made a similar claim in an interview with French television channel BFMTV, while he was under siege in Dammartin-en-Goële, where the brothers were killed on 9 January.