By Mohammed Ghobari, Mohammed Mukhashaf

Reuters 
 

SANAA: Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s injuries from a rocket attack on his palace at the weekend were more serious than previously reported, a Yemeni official said, raising further questions about his rule.
Saleh was initially said to have received a shrapnel wound, and his vice president was quoted Monday as saying the president would return to Yemen within days from Saudi Arabia where he is being treated.

The Yemeni official reiterated comments by a U.S. official, saying Saleh was in a more serious condition with burns over roughly 40 percent of his body. Britain called Tuesday for an orderly transition of power from Saleh.
In the capital Sanaa, thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Yemeni vice president’s residence Tuesday, demanding the acting leader form a transitional council to create a new government.

Outside the peaceful protest in Sanaa, battles raged in a southern town held by Islamist militants.
Around 4,000 demonstrators in Sanaa, who have been calling for Saleh to step down for five months, called for a “million-man march” for him to stay in Saudi Arabia, where he has been treated for injuries since Friday’s attack.
“The people want to form a transitional council, we will not sleep, we will not sit until the council is formed,” the protesters chanted.

Protesters carried banners that read “The blood of the liberated achieved victory,” while others waved banners saying “Our revolution is Yemeni, not Gulf or American.”
Saleh, 69, was wounded Friday when rockets struck his Sanaa palace, killing seven people and wounding senior officials and advisers in what his officials said was an assassination attempt. He is being treated in a Riyadh hospital.

The volatile situation in Yemen, which lies on vital oil shipping lanes, alarms Western powers and neighboring Saudi Arabia, which fear that chaos would enable the local Al-Qaeda franchise to operate more freely there.
They see Saleh’s absence for medical treatment in Riyadh as an opportunity to ease the president out of office after nearly 33 years ruling the impoverished Arab nation.

“We are calling for a peaceful and orderly transition,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Tuesday that “the situation in Yemen is extremely uncertain following President Saleh’s departure to Saudi Arabia to receive medical treatment and his transfer of authority to the vice president.”

“We urge the vice president to work closely with all sides to implement the Gulf Cooperation Council agreement and to begin political transition now,” he said, speaking to Parliament.
Saudi officials say it is up to Saleh whether he returns home or not, but they and their Western allies may want to revive a Gulf-brokered transition deal under which the Yemeni leader would quit in return for immunity from prosecution.

Saudi Arabia is worried by the activities of the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has staged daring if not very effective attacks on Saudi and U.S. targets.
The army said it had killed dozens of Islamist militants including a local Al-Qaeda leader in the southern town of Zinjibar, capital of the flashpoint Abyan province.
A local official said 15 soldiers had been killed in the battles for control of the town seized by militants some 10 days ago.

Some of Saleh’s opponents have accused the president of deliberately letting AQAP militants take over Zinjibar to demonstrate the security risks if he lost power.
The fighting has reduced Zinjibar, once home to more than 50,000 people, to a ghost town without power or running water.
Fighting also flared again in the city of Taiz, south of Sanaa, where anti-government gunmen have clashed sporadically with troops in the past few days.
A Saudi-brokered truce was holding in the capital after two weeks of fighting between Saleh’s forces and tribesmen in which more than 200 people were killed and thousands forced to flee.