SANAA, December 28 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The deputy leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) was assassinated at an Islamic conference Saturday, December 28, in the latest violence to hit the troubled Arabian peninsula republic.

Police and witnesses said Jarallah Omar was hit twice in the chest with bullets fired from a pistol and died on his way to hospital, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

He had just given a speech in the name of the YSP rejecting violence at the opening of a conference of the Al-Islah Party in Sanaa.

The killer was named as Ali Jarallah, and the Interior Ministry said he was an “extremist” member of Al-Islah who had been arrested previously for “incitement to violence against the state” and freed after the party’s leadership intervened.

Al-Islah said the party “strongly condemns this criminal act by a recidivist,” and called for “severe punishment”.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) condemned the murder as an “atrocious crime”.

“Terrorism will not dissuade us from continuing along the path of democracy,” the party said in a statement.

Armed bodyguards protecting Yemen’s parliament speaker and Al-Islah leader, Sheikh Abdullah Al-Ahmar, overpowered the gunman and took him to the sheikh’s house. He was turned over to police a few hours later, a source in Ahmar’s entourage said.

The Interior Ministry had called for Ahmar to hand over the man so that he could be put on trial.

Omar, who was in his 60s, was leaving the conference hall alongside a correspondent for Al-Jazeera television when the gunman walked up and opened fire, witnesses said.

The Qatar-based satellite station showed dramatic footage of two men dragging a wounded Omar from amongst a crowd of people to take him to hospital.

His feet banged against a stone staircase leading from the hall before he was shoved into the back of a four-wheel drive vehicle.

The YSP, now in the opposition as is Al-Islah, governed southern Yemen before it was unified with the north in May 1990.

In his speech, Omar called for national dialogue among the political factions in Yemen and rejected violence in a country largely governed along tribal lines.

Tribal chiefs operate with heavily-armed private militias who enforce traditional customs across large tracts of the country where the reach of the central government is limited.

Yemen is periodically wracked with violence, either political or tribal.

Omar, married with five children, passed out of the Yemeni police academy before founding the south Yemen Popular Union Party, which merged with the YSP when the country was unified.

The YSP led a failed secession bid in 1994 and its main leaders fled into exile. They have been sentenced to death in absentia for high treason.

In September 2000, the socialists upset the Sanaa government by confirming their exiled leadership at the head of the party. That included Ali Salem Al-Baid, who had been named president of the breakaway Democratic Republic of Yemen proclaimed at the southern port of Aden on May 21, 1994.