SANAA, 24 April 2005 — A Yemeni appeals court yesterday upheld the death sentence imposed on an extremist scholar for the assassination of a senior opposition politician three years ago.
Ali Ahmad Jarallah, 28, confessed in July 2003 that he had acted alone in shooting dead Jarallah Omar, deputy leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party, at a congress in Sanaa of the Islamic-oriented Al-Islah party. He was arrested at the scene of the slaying.
In a 12-page ruling, the Sanaa court rejected the appeal for leniency by Jarallah who was convicted of shooting Omar several times at close range on Dec. 28, 2002. A lower court sentenced him to death last year.
“We uphold the conviction of Ali Ahmad Jarallah and his sentence to death as prescribed by the Shariah,” said the appeals court chief judge, Muhammad Al-Akwaa.
Jarallah was to be executed by firing squad after the Supreme Court and President Ali Abdullah Saleh ratified the sentence, court officials said.
The appeals court acquitted 10 others who had previously been sentenced to prison terms of three to 10 years for belonging to a gang that the scholar allegedly created to murder socialists, Arab nationalists and converts to Christianity.
Jarallah immediately blasted the verdict as unfair, saying the killing was part of a “holy war” against apostates and infidels.
“I killed a man who did not want Islamic law to be in use,” Jarallah, in a blue prison suit, told the judge from behind the barred courtroom dock, his hands cuffed.
The conviction upheld against Jarallah also included his involvement in a plot that killed three Americans at a Southern Baptist missionary hospital in Jibla, southern Yemen, two days after Omar’s assassination, as well as forming a terror cell to buy weapons and kill local officials and foreigners.
Mohammed Al-Mikhlafy, the lawyer representing the late politician’s family, was critical of the court’s decision to acquit the alleged accomplices of Jarallah.
“The ruling was flawed,” he told reporters outside the courthouse. “The court has now given the acquitted defendants the chance to continue killing socialists and other secular politicians. It has ignored the political implications of this case.”
Security has been tight for the trial, with several police vehicles and roadblocks just outside. Jarallah and the acquitted defendants were taken away in an armored vehicle; their chants of “God is Great!” could be heard from inside.
Prosecutors had said Jarallah confessed to forming the terror cell to target secularists, Christians and other minority sects.
Another militant, 32-year-old Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, who was sentenced to death for killing the American missionaries, had told the court during his trial that he had coordinated his attack with Jarallah.
On Dec. 30, 2002, Kamel walked through a hospital security checkpoint, concealing his weapon under loose-fitting clothes, and opened fire at a staff meeting.
The shooting killed hospital director William E. Koehn, 60, of Kansas; purchasing agent Kathleen A. Gariety, 53, of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin; and Dr. Martha C. Myers, 57, of Montgomery, Alabama.
Jarallah was a member of Al-Islah but quit the party shortly before the killing, complaining it had gone soft on its goals. The Socialist Party governed southern Yemen before it was unified with the north in 1990.
