SANAA, 27 June 2004 — Fourteen terror suspects standing trial in Yemen told the court yesterday they were tortured by intelligence officers in pre-trial detention.

The defendants continued their refusal to offer pleas and said transcripts of the interrogations were forged and that they had been forced into signing them.

As prosecutors started to read confessions of the suspects, they collectively shouted from their holding cell in the courtroom in protest and said that those confessions were taken under duress.

“Some of us were given electric shocks,” Fawaz Arrabyee, a main suspect, told the court during the hearing that was attended by relatives of the accused. All the 14 suspects refused to answer the court’s questions and referred them to their lawyers, although most of defense team was not present.

Ten lawyers boycotted the hearing yesterday in protest against the court’s insistence to bar the defense team from copying records of the case.

According to defendants’ testimony presented to the court by prosecutors, most confessed they had joined the Al-Qaeda network.

They allegedly acknowledged that they had been recruited by the group’s leader in Yemen, Abu-Ali Al-Harthi, who was killed in a strike by an unmanned US aircraft in eastern Yemen in 2002.

The suspects are being tried over alleged involvement in terrorist attacks, including the October 2002 bombing of a French oil supertanker off Yemen’s southeastern coast.

Four of the defendants are accused of planning and carrying out the attack on the supertanker Limburg.

According to the bill of indictments, the five bought a small boat and loaded it with more than 1,200 kilograms of TNT and 20 kilograms of C-4 explosives.

The boat rammed the tanker at the Al-Dhabba port. One Bulgarian crewmember was killed in the attack.

Ten of the suspects are charged with attacking a helicopter belonging to the US company Hunt Oil after take-off from Sanaa International Airport in November 2002.

All 14 are collectively accused of carrying out bombings near Political Security Organization (intelligence) buildings and the homes of three top intelligence officials in 2003. No one was hurt in the attacks.

Nine are charged with planning suicide attacks on foreign embassies, and plotting to assassinate US Ambassador Edmund J. Hull.

In the last hearing on June 19, the defense team protested the Sanaa anti-terrorism court’s decision to continue with the trial without giving the lawyers full access to their clients’ files.

They told the court that meeting their demand for a copy of the files and records related to the case was a prerequisite for continuing their work.

“This is not a fair trial. This is a military trial and illegal secrecy,” Muhammad Naji Allaw, head of the defense team, shouted when the chief judge, Muhammad Al-Jurmozi, ruled that the defense teams could check the files only at the court and were not permitted to take copies away with them.

The court adjourned trial for one week, in the fifth postponement since it began on May 29.