Elbaneh 10 Year Sentence in Oil Facilities Attack Upheld
Yemen puts Qaeda operative back in jail
Reuters
Monday, May 19, 2008
SANA, Yemen: A Yemeni-American on the FBI’s most-wanted list of terror suspects was jailed in Yemen after an appeals court upheld his 10-year prison sentence, officials said Monday.Washington had offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to Jaber Elbaneh’s arrest, but Yemeni law forbade his extradition even after the police arrested him in 2004.
Elbaneh, who has been accused of belonging to Al Qaeda, has been convicted of plots to attack oil installations in Yemen and of involvement in a 2002 attack on the French tanker Limburg off Yemen’s coast that killed one person.
The Yemeni authorities allowed Elbaneh to go free during an appeals process – even after he was convicted, jailed, escaped from prison and turned himself in.
The United States put pressure on Yemen to imprison Elbaneh, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, raised the issue in meetings last month with Yemeni leaders in Sana, the capital, a security official said Monday on condition of anonymity.
But the official said Yemen continues to refuse a request from the United States that it hand over Elbaneh and Jamal al-Badawi, the Qaeda mastermind of the bombing of the U.S. warship Cole in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors.
On Sunday, Elbaneh was sent to a maximum-security prison in Sana, an official from the state prosecutor’s office said on condition of anonymity.
It was the same facility Elbaneh and 22 other convicts had escaped from in February 2006 by digging a tunnel to a nearby mosque.
In May 2003, U.S. prosecutors charged Elbaneh in absentia with conspiring with a group known as the “Lackawanna Six” to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.
The Yemeni authorities arrested him in 2004, but he escaped from prison less than two years later.
Last year, a Yemeni court charged Elbaneh in absentia for plotting to attack oil installments in the country. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Elbaneh turned himself into the authorities in December, but never went back to prison.
