Yemen has arrested members of a spy ring that was led by a former commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the state Saba news agency said yesterday, as the country’s president told Tehran to butt out of its internal affairs.

In a series of SMS messages, Saba said the spy cell had operated in Yemen as well as in the Horn of Africa and that it had kept an operations centre in Sanaa. An interior ministry official said all those detained were Yemenis.

In an apparent reference to the incident, President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi called on Iran to stay out of Yemen’s affairs.

“We hope that our brothers in Iran won’t interfere in Yemen’s affairs and that they take into consideration the sensitive situation in Yemen,” Hadi said. “Leave Yemen alone, enough is enough.”

Battling a secessionist movement and a tribal-based rebellion, Hadi, who succeeded long-time leader Ali Abdullah Saleh in February, is trying to direct a US-backed offensive against Islamist fighters, while seeking to unify a divided army.

The US views Yemen as a frontline in its “counter-terrorism” campaign and has previously accused Iran of meddling in southern and northern Yemen.

The US ambassador to Sanaa, Gerald Feierstein, said earlier this year that Shia Iran was working with Shia Muslim rebels in northern Yemen and secessionists in the south to gain influence at the expense of Yemen’s Gulf neighbours.

Hadi took office in February promising to fight the country’s branch of Al Qaeda, whose local affiliates took control of parts of southern Yemen during an uprising against Saleh, and plotted abortive attacks on US and Saudi targets from Yemen.

Although the military has driven Al Qaeda-linked militants from several towns in Abyan and Shabwa provinces, the group earlier this month carried out a suicide attack in Sanaa, killing 10 people.

The government’s hold on much of the south remains tenuous. Yesterday, armed men cut off roads leading to a government compound in Dalea province and prevented employees from entering the building, the defence ministry website reported.