Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi sworn in as Yemen's new president.

The New York Times - Abed Rabu Mansour Hadi was sworn in as president of Yemen on Saturday morning in front of Parliament after he won an early presidential election in which he was the only candidate.

Meanwhile, former President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned to the country in the early hours of Saturday after a trip to the United States, where he received medical treatment for injuries sustained during an attack on his presidential palace in June.

Mr. Saleh “returned to his private residence in Sana, not the presidential palace,” said Mohammed Albasaha, a spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington. He left the United States a few days ago for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, according to a Yemeni diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press.

As the ceremony was playing out in Sana, a car containing explosives blew up while trying to attack a presidential palace in southern Yemen. Reuters, citing witnesses and medical personnel, said that at least 26 people were killed and dozens were injured. Most of the dead were soldiers, according to media reports. The attack, apparently by a suicide bomber, occurred at the entrance of the presidential palace in Mukalla, according to media reports.

Ahmed al-Rammah, who witnessed the blast, told The Associated Press that he saw a pickup moving slowly to the gate as soldiers were coming out. Then it exploded, he told The A.P. The blast was followed by heavy gunfire from the surviving guards.

Yemen’s Supreme Commission for Elections and Referendum announced Friday night that Mr. Hadi had won the election with 99.6 percent of the vote. A total of 6,651,166 Yemenis voted for Mr. Hadi, and 15,974 voted against, by writing “No” in the box next to a photo of Mr. Hadi on the white ballot sheet, according to Nadia al-Sakkaf, the editor in chief of the English-language Yemen Times newspaper, who is helping to organize information about the election for Western news media.

Nearly 9,000 ballots were deemed invalid when, for example, some antigovernment protesters wrote statements like “the revolution continues” on their ballot sheets, apparently unwilling to vote for Mr. Hadi because he came from within Mr. Saleh’s inner circle.