A Houthi fighter mans a weapon on a patrol truck as he guards the site of a demonstration against Saudi-led coalition airstrikes, in Sanaa April 3, 2015. REUTERS/Mohamed al-Sayaghi

By Yara Bayoumy

CAIRO (Reuters) - Yemen's Houthis are ready to sit down for peace talks as long as a Saudi-led air campaign is halted and the negotiations are overseen by "non-aggressive" parties, a senior Houthi member said.

Saleh al-Sammad, who was an adviser to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, also told Reuters in emailed answers that Yemenis reject the return of Hadi, who escaped to Saudi Arabia after Shi'ite Houthi fighters edged closer to his southern base of Aden last month.

Warplanes and ships from a Saudi-led coalition have been bombing the Iran-allied Houthi forces for 11 days, saying they are trying drive back the Houthis and restore Hadi. U.N. brokered peace talks in the preceding weeks between Hadi and the Houthis had failed.

"We still stand by our position on dialogue and we demand its continuation despite everything that has happened, on the basis of respect and acknowledging the other," Sammad said.

"We have no conditions except a halt to the aggression and sitting on the dialogue table within a specific time period ... and any international or regional parties that have no aggressive positions towards the Yemeni people can oversee the dialogue," Sammad said, without specifying who they might be.

Sammad added that he wanted the dialogue sessions aired to the Yemeni people "so that they can know who is the obstructer".

Saudi Arabia's King Salman was quoted as saying on Monday that the kingdom was also ready for a political meeting of Yemeni parties, under the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Five out of the six GCC member states are part of the military coalition bombing which is bombing the Houthis.

PROXY WAR

Houthi fighters seized the capital Sanaa six months ago and last month launched an offensive on the south, backed by army units loyal to longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh.

That prompted Saudi Arabia to launch a campaign of air strikes on March 26 alongside regional Sunni Muslim Arab allies.

The United Nations says more than 500 people have been killed in the past two weeks in Yemen and nearly 1,700 wounded.

The conflict has turned Yemen into another front in Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia's proxy war with Shi'ite rival Iran, a struggle which is also playing out in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Tehran denies Riyadh's charges that its arms the Houthis, and Sammad dismissed the accusations as rumors. "Even if there was Iranian support as is being said, it is not an excuse for this flagrant aggression," he said.

Sammad denied the Houthis want control of the south, home to a long-running secessionist movement, and said they were focused on confronting the threat from al Qaeda.

"The sons of the south will run their own affairs and they will have the more prominent role in the coming political scene," he said.

(Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Nairobi (AFP) - Kenyan special forces were not deployed to a university massacre in which 148 people died for at least seven hours, reports said Sunday, as the government defended the response.

Alarm bells rang at Kenya's elite Recce Company in Nairobi as soon as the first reports of Thursday's pre-dawn attack emerged.

But it took until just before 2:00 pm for the main team to reach the attack site in the northeastern town of Garissa, Kenya's major Nation newspaper said, noting that the first plane to the city carried the interior minister and police chief.

"This is negligence on a scale that borders on the criminal," the Nation wrote in its editorial on Sunday, recalling how survivors said "the gunmen, who killed scores of students with obvious relish, took their time".

Some journalists based in Nairobi who drove the 365 kilometres (225 miles) to Garissa after hearing the first reports of the attack arrived before the special forces, who came by air.

The Standard newspaper's editorial cartoon accused security forces of sleeping on the job, depicting a snake labelled "terror threat" waking a snoring security officer with a bite, as a dog barks, "too little, too late".

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Students evacuated from Moi University are treated for shock by the Red-Cross in Garissa on April 3, …

Interior Minster Joseph Nkaissery has said the attack was "one of those incidents which can surprise any country," while President Uhuru Kenyatta paid his tribute to the three police and three soldiers killed, who paid "the ultimate price in their selfless service to Kenya."

But newspapers on Sunday were deeply critical of the government response.

- Response 'beggars belief' -

The day-long seige that began long before dawn in Garissa, close to the border with Somalia, claimed 148 lives, including 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.

About an hour before darkness fell, around 5:00 pm, troops moved in on the dormitory where the gunmen were holed up, apparently determined to prevent the siege lasting overnight as seen in the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi in September 2013, when Shebab fighters killed at least 67 people over four days.

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A member of the security forces escorts a student out of Garissa University campus on April 2, 2015 …

"It... beggars belief that many of the failures that were witnessed during the Westgate siege -- including the late deployment of specialised police -- were repeated in Garissa," the Nation added.

The massacre was Kenya's deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi.

But Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed defended the response, telling AFP on Saturday that "fighting terrorism... is like being a goalkeeper. You have 100 saves, and nobody remembers them. They remember that one that went past you."

Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka also dismissed the criticism.

"If you look at how we responded it was not bad at all, say, compared to Westgate," he told the Nation.

"It takes time to assess and make the decisions, escalating it from National Security Advisory Committee to the National Security Council and then to scramble the elite units, get them to the airport and fly them to Garissa which is a two hour flight. There were many moving parts."

Wochit
Two Teens in England Arrested in Terror Investigation

LONDON (AP) — British police say a teenage boy and girl have been arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.

Greater Manchester Police said Sunday a 14-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl have been arrested following two separate police raids that took place Thursday and Friday. Police say they had warrants for both searches.

The two teens have not been named and both have been freed on bail until a May 28 court hearing.

Police say they were arrested on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism as part of an ongoing investigation.

The number of terrorism-related arrests in Britain has surged in recent months as an increasing number of Britons try to travel to Syria to link up with Islamic State group extremists there.

Separately, police are questioning six people arrested earlier Friday in the port city of Dover, which has extensive ferry service linking England to France.

Five men and one woman in their 20s were arrested in a departure lounge there Friday night.

Police have been given permission to question the six until Friday before they have to charged, released, or subjected to another warrant for more questioning.

Earlier this week nine Britons from one family were arrested in Turkey trying to enter Syria. Police said the new arrests are not related to the detention of the family in Turkey.

Nairobi (AFP) - Kenya authorities have named one of the gunmen who killed 148 people in a university massacre as an ethnic Somali Kenyan national and law graduate, highlighting the Al-Qaeda-linked Shebab's ability to recruit within the country.

Interior ministry spokesman Mwenda Njoka said high-flying Abdirahim Abdullahi was "a university of Nairobi law graduate and described by a person who knows him well as a brilliant upcoming lawyer".

The spokesman said Abdullahi's father, a local official in the northeastern county of Mandera, had "reported to the authorities that his son had gone missing and suspected the boy had gone to Somalia".

Describing Abdullahi as an A-grade student, Njoka said it was "critical that parents whose children go missing or show tendencies of having been exposed to violent extremism report to authorities".

Kenya entered the second of three days of national mourning on Monday for those killed in last week's massacre, the vast majority of whom were students.

Hundreds had packed Nairobi's Anglican cathedral on Sunday, where Archbishop Eliud Wabukala said Easter services were overshadowed by "great and terrible evil" as police patrolled outside.

"These terrorists want to cause divisions in our society, but we shall tell them, 'You will never prevail'," the archbishop said.

Somalia's Shebab militants attacked the university in the northeastern town of Garissa at dawn on Thursday, lining up non-Muslim students for execution in what President Uhuru Kenyatta described as a "barbaric medieval slaughter".

Although Kenyatta has vowed to retaliate "in the severest way possible", there have also been calls for national unity.

He said people's "justified anger" should not lead to "the victimisation of anyone" -- a clear reference to Kenya's large Muslim and Somali minorities in a country where 80 percent of the population is Christian.

- 'Kenya is at war' -

The massacre, Kenya's deadliest attack since the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi, claimed the lives of 142 students, three police officers and three soldiers.

Top Muslim and Christian leaders also offered their condolences.

"Kenya is at war, and we must all stand together," said Hassan Ole Naado, the deputy head of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, saying the organisation was helping to raise money for the funerals of those killed and the medical costs of the scores of wounded.

"We deeply feel the pain of the loss of young lives," he added in a statement, warning that the Shebab was aiming to "create religious conflict".

Pope Francis called the killings "senseless brutality", while the Cairo-based top Sunni Muslim body Al-Azhar has condemned the "terrorist act committed by Somalia's Shebab".

On Saturday, Shebab warned of a "long, gruesome war" unless Kenya withdrew its troops from Somalia, and threatened "another bloodbath".

Hours after the Shebab's warning, police in Garissa paraded four corpses of the gunmen piled on top of each other face down in the back of a pick-up truck.

Five men have also been arrested in connection with the attack, including three "coordinators" captured as they fled towards Somalia, and two others in the university.

The two arrested on campus included a security guard and a Tanzanian found "hiding in the ceiling" and holding grenades, the interior ministry said.

A $215,000 (200,000 euro) bounty has also been offered for alleged Shebab commander Mohamed Mohamud, a former Kenyan teacher said to be the mastermind behind the attack.

The Shebab fled their power base Somalia's capital Mogadishu in 2011, and continue to battle an African Union force, AMISOM, sent to drive them out that includes troops from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda.

The group has carried out a string of revenge attacks in neighbouring countries, notably Kenya and Uganda, in response to their participation in the AU force.

Shebab fighters also carried out the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi in September 2013, a four-day siege which left at least 67 people dead.

- Security forces criticised -

Armed guards hired to protect Kenyan churches on Easter Sunday (video)

The remaining 600 traumatised student survivors from the now-closed college have since left Garissa, boarding buses for their home towns.

Over 200 family members of those killed continue their agonising wait for the remains of their loved ones at the main mortuary in Nairobi.

One of them was 50-year-old Abraham Koech, who last heard from his daughter when she called him on Thursday saying, "Terrorists have come and I'm hiding under the bed."

Koech said identification of corpses was difficult because the "bullets have deformed the heads" of the victims.

There has been growing criticism in the media that critical intelligence warnings were missed, and that special forces units took seven hours to reach the university, some 365 kilometres (225 miles) from the capital.

Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed defended the response, telling AFP that "fighting terrorism... is like being a goalkeeper. You have 100 saves, and nobody remembers them. They remember that one that went past you."

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama staunchly defended a framework nuclear agreement with Iran as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to prevent a bomb and bring longer-term stability to the Middle East. He insisted the U.S. would stand by Israel if it were to come under attack, but acknowledged that his pursuit of diplomacy with Tehran has caused strain with the close ally.

"It's been a hard period," Obama said in a weekend interview with Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times. He added that it is "personally difficult" for him to hear his administration accused of not looking out for Israel's interests.

Now in his seventh year in office, Obama cast the Iran talks as part of a broader foreign policy doctrine that sees American power as a safeguard that gives him the ability to take calculated risks.

"We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk," he said, citing his overtures to Cuba and Myanmar as other examples of his approach.

The president's comments come days after the U.S. and other world powers reached a tentative agreement to curb Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. The framework cleared the way for negotiators to hammer out technical details ahead of a June 30 deadline for a final deal.

Obama argued that successful negotiations presented the most effective way to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, but insisted he would keep all options on the table if Tehran were to violate the terms.

"I've been very clear that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon on my watch, and I think they should understand that we mean it," Obama said in the interview published Sunday. "But I say that hoping that we can conclude this diplomatic arrangement — and that it ushers a new era in U.S.-Iranian relations — and, just as importantly, over time, a new era in Iranian relations with its neighbors."

The president said there are many details that still need to be worked out with the Iranians and cautioned that there would be "real political difficulties" in implementing an agreement in both countries. He reiterated his opposition to a legislation that would give the U.S. Congress final say in approving or rejecting a deal, but said he hoped to find a path to allow Congress to "express itself."

The White House plans an aggressive campaign to sell the deal to Congress, as well as to skeptical Arab allies who worry about Iran's destabilizing activity in the region. The president has invited leaders of six Gulf nations to Washington this spring and said he wanted to "formalize" U.S. assistance.

On the substance of the Iran framework agreement, Obama outlined more specifics of how the U.S. would seek to verify that Tehran wasn't cheating. He said there would be an "international mechanism" that would assess whether there needed to be an inspection at a suspicious site and could overrule Iranian objections.

The nuclear talks have marked a remarkable shift in the frozen relationship between the U.S. and Iran. It has become normal for officials from both countries to communicate and hold face-to-face meetings. Obama is yet to meet with Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, though they did speak on the phone. He has also exchanged letters with Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Obama said the letters include "a lot of reminders of what he perceives as past grievances against Iran." But he said the concessions Khamenei allowed his negotiators to make in the nuclear talks suggests that "he does realize that the sanctions regime that we put together was weakening Iran over the long term, and that if in fact he wanted to see Iran re-enter the community of nations, then there were going to have to be changes."

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Associated Press writer Hope Yen contributed to this report.

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