Former U.S. Special Forces Accused Of Working As Mercenaries In Assassination Plot In Yemen: Report

A Yemeni lawmaker has accused former American special forces members of being part of a mercenary group that was hired by the United Arab Emirates to kill him as part of an assassination program.

NPR reported that the lawsuit was filed by Anssaf Ali Mayo, a member of Yemen’s parliament. The lawsuit alleges that the UAE paid the mercenary group, known as Spear, $1.5 million a month to kill people in Yemen.

The lawsuit names Israeli-Hungarian Abraham Golan and Americans Isaac Gilmore and Dale Comstock.

The notion that there was an assassination program in Yemen during the civil war is not new. In 2018, Golan admitted to Buzzfeed News that “there was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it. We did it. It was sanctioned by the UAE within the coalition.”

The BBC reported last year that some members of Spear acknowledged the assassination program, stating that it had begun in 2015. The BBC report stated that the UAE, however, has denied the existence of the program.

“The individuals that were employed by Spear Operations Group, many of them were former U.S. Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, who were highly trained by the U.S. government at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer,” Ela Matthews told NPR. Matthews is with the Center for Justice & Accountability, which is representing Mayo.

“And they used their skills and the military know-how to sell essentially a killing program to the highest bidder. And they tried to assassinate our client, who is a politician in Yemen,” Matthews said.

This week, the New York Post reported that another member of Spear, was accused of plotting to assassinate the president of Serbia. The newspaper reported that Daniel Corbett was arrested in 2018 and held for 18 months. He was then released, and all charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

Corbett is not named in the Mayo lawsuit.