A member of Yemen’s Parliament is suing three security contractors in U.S. federal court, accusing them of carrying out targeted killings of perceived political opponents in Yemen on behalf of the United Arab Emirates.
The contractors have acknowledged in media interviews in recent years that they had tried to kill the Yemeni lawmaker, Anssaf Mayo, as part of what they described as a covert program set up by the Emirati government.
The suit was brought by Mr. Mayo, who survived the attempt on his life in 2015 in the city of Aden in southern Yemen.
It accuses two American military veterans, Isaac Gilmore and Dale Comstock, of carrying out “targeted assassinations of perceived political opponents in Yemen,” including the attempt to kill Mr. Mayo, at the behest of the Emirati government. It also names a third man, Abraham Golan, an Israeli-Hungarian dual citizen who was once a resident in the United States.
The Emirati government has denied that it financed assassinations in Yemen but has said it supported what it called counterterrorism operations there.
Around the time of the attempted killing, Yemen’s civil war had just begun. The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen had seized much of country’s north, forcing the internationally backed Yemeni government into exile. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates joined forces in a military coalition to fight the Houthis.
The three men named in the suit described the operation in which they tried to kill Mr. Mayo in interviews with Buzzfeed News published in 2018 and aired on the BBC in 2024.
“There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen,” Mr. Golan told Buzzfeed News when it broke the story in 2018. “I was running it. We did it.”
The men told Buzzfeed that they were initially given 23 targets, and Mr. Golan said that his team killed several people. Mr. Mayo was the only one the men agreed to name. But all three have been unusually frank about their actions in Yemen.
The men said they worked for a private security company founded by Mr. Golan and incorporated in Delaware, called Spear Operations Group.
The lawsuit was filed earlier, but was initially sealed and inaccessible to the public. It was unsealed last week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
Lawyers for Mr. Mayo wrote in the lawsuit that Mr. Golan and Mr. Gilmore lived in or near San Diego, Calif., while they were recruiting men for the program and used the area as a base for their operation.
“The U.S. Department of State, which regulates private U.S. companies that provide military services to foreign nations, never granted Spear the authority to provide targeted assassination services to another country, nor has it ever granted any other U.S. corporation the authority to do so,” lawyers for Mr. Mayo wrote in their complaint.
Mr. Mayo is seeking an unspecified sum in compensation and punitive damages.
“I want justice,” Mr. Mayo told The New York Times in February in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. “My family was subjected to a state of fear and panic.”
He said he went into exile in Saudi Arabia two days after the assassination attempt — a bombing that he narrowly escaped. He then spent years separated from his family, missing the death of his sister and his daughter’s college graduation.
Mr. Golan, Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Comstock did not respond to requests for comment sent via email and on their social media accounts.
On his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Comstock markets himself as an “elite performance coach” based in Bali and Florida. Mr. Gilmore’s social media profiles describe him as a consultant in weapons instruction and tactical combat as well as a stuntman. Mr. Golan’s current whereabouts were unclear.
The Emirati foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Mayo is represented by lawyers from the Center for Justice & Accountability, a U.S.-based human rights organization. His lawsuit puts a focus on the systems governing whether U.S. citizens can serve as mercenaries for foreign governments.
U.S. federal law criminalizes the act of conspiring to kill someone in a foreign country. However, it does not necessarily ban serving in a foreign military. U.S. citizens have served in the Israeli military, for example.
As they were setting up the plan, the defendants requested to be incorporated into the Emirati armed forces “under the erroneous belief that doing so would shield them from legal liability for their otherwise unlawful actions,” Mr. Mayo’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.
“By failing to sufficiently regulate and prosecute the illegal actions of former U.S. military members, the U.S. is facilitating the sale of unchecked lethality to the highest bidder,” Daniel McLaughlin, the legal director for the Center for Justice & Accountability, said in a news release on Monday about the lawsuit.
“Our government has a duty to regulate how former members of our military use their training and know-how, and a responsibility to hold them accountable when they break the law,” Mr. McLaughlin said in the release.
The Emirates is a U.S. ally and hosts a major American air base. In their past interviews, the defendants have argued that they were conducting counterterrorism operations for a government friendly to the United States.
“We would do our own due diligence, do our own background checks on the guys and if we felt like yeah, he’s a legitimate target, we’re good to go,” Mr. Comstock told the BBC in an interview broadcast in 2024.
Aden, where Mr. Mayo lived, became the capital in exile for the internationally recognized Yemeni government. Eventually, much of the city came under the control of the U.A.E. and its local allies in Yemen.
Mr. Golan and Mr. Gilmore told Buzzfeed in the article published in 2018 that the Emirati government had hired Spear Operations Group in 2015, and that they then recruited other men including Mr. Comstock to carry out the killings with them for a fee of $1.5 million per month. Spear handed them a list of multiple targets, with Mr. Mayo at the top of the list.
Mr. Mayo — a member of Yemen’s House of Representatives since 2003 — was the head of the al-Islah party in Aden. His party is one of Yemen’s largest political organizations, with a broad coalition encompassing a variety of Islamist and tribal figures.
The Emirati leader, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, views political Islamism — which he appears to define vaguely and broadly — as a major security threat to the region at large, and to his own country.
In their interviews, the men described the details of the operation in which they tried to kill Mr. Mayo, placing a bomb on the door of his office building in December 2015. Mr. Mayo escaped, leaving the building shortly before the explosion, and went into hiding.
When the bomb went off, a group of prominent Yemeni journalists were gathered inside his office and could have been killed instead of him, he said. But all survived.
It was not until three years later, when the Buzzfeed investigation was published, that Mr. Mayo learned who had been behind his assassination attempt. He was shocked, he said.
“I was deeply saddened because of our relationship with the Americans — they are our friends,” he said.
In the BBC investigation that aired in 2024, Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Comstock spoke about the operations.
“Sorry, I love hunting down bad guys and ending them,” Mr. Comstock said.
Mr. Gilmore said that he saw their work as counterterrorism operations within a complex war.
“Modern conflicts are unfortunately very opaque,” Mr. Gilmore said. “We see this in Yemen — one person’s civil leader and cleric is another person’s terrorist leader.”
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The post Lawsuit Accuses Americans of Political Killings for Hire Overseas appeared first on New York Times.
