A drone strike in southern Yemen killed three more suspected al-Qaeda militants, local officials said, in the third day of strikes against militant targets in the country, BBC News reported.
A missile hit and destroyed the men's car as they were traveling through Shabwa province early Monday morning.
A helicopter arrived soon afterwards to retrieve their bodies, suggesting one might have been a senior militant, witnesses told the AFP news agency.
Over the past three days, a series of drone strikes have killed more than 40 militants, according to BBC News.
In the remote, mountainous area of Wadi Ghadina, in the neighboring province of Abyan, drones fired missiles at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula training camps on Sunday. They killed about 30 militants.
The targeted militants were "leading and dangerous elements" of al-Qaeda, an official source at the High Security Committee was cited by the state news agency, Saba, as saying, deriving of various nationalities.
The operation was based on "certain intelligence information that terrorist elements were training in those camps and planning to target vital civilian and military facilities", the official added.
To support government's efforts to tackle AQAP and its allies, the U.S. carries out drone strikes in Yemen, but usually remains mum and does not comment on their operations.
The attacks come days after a video was posted online showing AQAP leader Nasser al-Wuhayshi telling a large gathering of militants in Yemen that the jihadist group would fight Western "Crusaders" everywhere, BBC News reported.
"O brothers, the Crusader enemy is still shuffling his papers, so we must remember that we are always fighting the biggest enemy, the leaders of disbelief, and we have to overthrow those leaders, we have to remove the Cross, and the carrier of the Cross is America," he declared.
AQAP poses "probably the greatest external threat" to the U.S., the chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, Michael McCaul, said on Sunday.
"And so I think the fact the administration now is going aggressively against these terrorists... is a very positive sign," he told ABC News.
