At the scene, the mutual friend had recognized the car, stopped in the middle of a street. A thick billow of smoke rose from the Lexus into the afternoon sky, as a crowd of Yemeni men jostled toward it, shouting and holding up their cellphones to take pictures. The street was thick with pedestrians at that time of day, but none of them appeared to have been harmed despite the obvious power of the blast. The windows and windshield had been blown apart, and the car’s interior had been reduced to a snarl of twisted steel. The subsequent fire had consumed everything that wasn’t metal: the
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