Yemeni Lawmaker Says Former US Military Members Were Hired to Kill Him — The Assassination Lawsuit Explained

A Yemeni lawmaker is suing former US military members who he says were hired to assassinate him. Here is the extraordinary legal case and what it reveals about private military operations.

The lawsuit filed by a Yemeni lawmaker against former United States military personnel who he alleges were hired to conduct an assassination attempt against him — reported by NPR — represents one of the more extraordinary legal cases in the complex intersection of private military contracting, extra-judicial violence, and the legal accountability of former military personnel conducting operations for private clients.

The lawmaker, Anssaf Ali Mayo, was targeted in 2015 — the period when Yemen's civil conflict was in its most acute phase and when various external actors were deeply invested in Yemen's political outcome. His specific account of the assassination attempt involves former US military members operating in Yemen in what he characterises as a for-hire private capacity rather than in official US government service.

The legal jurisdiction and accountability questions this lawsuit raises are exactly the ones that the privatisation of military operations over the past 30 years has repeatedly created without fully resolving. Former military personnel retain US citizen legal status that makes them potentially subject to US civil and criminal law regardless of where they operate. Whether they can be held liable in US courts for actions taken in foreign countries, in private rather than official US government capacity, on behalf of clients whose identity and legitimacy are themselves contested, is a legal question that courts have addressed inconsistently.

The specific context of Yemen's conflict — involving multiple foreign state actors, private armed groups, and the general breakdown of legal authority that civil wars produce — makes jurisdictional and evidentiary questions particularly complex. Mayo's ability to sustain the lawsuit in US courts depends on establishing that US courts have jurisdiction over the specific defendants for actions taken in Yemen, and on producing evidence that meets civil litigation standards despite the information environment in which the alleged assassination attempt occurred.

For European governments that have used private military contractors in their own operations, the Mayo case is a data point about the legal accountability frameworks that these arrangements exist within.