A Muslim fundamentalist shot dead the deputy leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP) at an Islamist conference on Saturday in the latest violence to hit the troubled Arabian peninsula republic.
Police and witnesses said Mr Jarallah Omar was hit twice in the chest with bullets fired from a pistol and died on his way to hospital.
He had just given a speech in the name of the YSP rejecting violence at the opening of a conference of the Islamist al-Islah Party in Sanaa.
The killer was named as Mr Ali Jarallah, believed to follow the hardline Salafi branch of Islam.
He was studying at Yemen's al-Iman university, which is run by controversial al-Islah thinker Sheikh Abul Majid al-Zindani and was closed briefly last year as a hotbed of fundamentalism.
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".
AFP