19 Acquited of Terror Charges
I have to check which 19 this is.
almotamar.net – SANA’A- The Specialized Court of Appeal ruled that 19 prisoner, of whom five are Saudis, are innocent of forming an armed gang, convicting six of charges of forging official documents.
Chaired by Judge Saeed al-Qatta, the Court passed on a judgment ruling that the defense can be accepted.
Ali Naji, Jamal al-Maqrami, and Mohammed al-Qirshi were sentenced to three years in prisons each, with charges of forming an armed gang targeting the Americans in Yemen. Abdullah Naji, Abdullah Ahmed al-Shajarah, Ammar Abdullah Fadel, Muhsen Mabkhout, Mohammed Falah al-Qahtani, Mohammed Manqoush were convicted of forging official documents. They were sentenced to two to three years in prison. The Court ruled the other prisoners were innocent of forming an armed gang.
Sounds like the appeal of the Zarchawi linked cell.
Update: Yup. This group which admitted fighting in Iraq faced no penalty for that when the judge found that jihad against the occupiers of Muslim lands is in accordance with Islamic Sharia Law. So Yemeni law finds it legal to kill foreign nationals as long as its outside the border and can be loosely defined as “jihad.”
A Yemeni appeals court has acquitted 19 suspected members of an Al-Qaeda cell of terror charges, convicting only six of the group of forging documents.
The 19, including five Saudi nationals, had been charged by the prosecutor’s office with having plotted anti-US attacks in Yemen at the behest of the then head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed last June in a US air raid near Baghdad.
The so-called “Zarqawi group” was acquitted in July by a Sanaa court which specializes in state security matters on grounds of lack of evidence on Saturday.
The prosecutor challenged the verdict in an appeals court that looks into cases related to state security.
But judge Saeed al-Qattaa, presiding over the appeals court, again threw out the charge that the 19 men had formed an armed group and plotted attacks against Americans in Yemen.
He said there was not sufficient proof to support prosecution charges that they had “taken part in the formation of an armed unit” and “the planning of attacks against Americans in Yemen and Yemenis who deal with them.”
Six members of the group, including one Saudi, were however convicted of forging travel and other official documents. Two of those, both Yemenis, were jailed for three years while the court sufficed with the jail terms already served by the four others since their arrest.
The members of the group were detained in several parts of Yemen early last year, some after their return from fighting US-led forces in Iraq.
Their trial, which opened in February, was the latest in a number of cases involving suspected militants in Yemen, several of whom have been convicted.
The impoverished Arabian peninsula country has seen a series of attacks in recent years, notably the bombing by Al-Qaeda militants of the US destroyer Cole in the southern port of Aden in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors.
A 2002 attack against the French oil tanker Limburg killed one Bulgarian crew member and wounded 12 others.
