CAIRO, 20 May 2005 — Muslims yesterday dismissed the religious justification for killing innocents given by Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq.

Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi defended the killing of innocent Muslims in suicide bombings against US forces in a message on a website. He said Muslim scholars permitted such conduct for the sake of jihad.

“This is a deviant notion and Zarqawi, with all due respect, is not an expert on Islamic jurisprudence. His views are illegitimate,” said Saudi Islamic researcher Youssef Al-Dayni.

“These people killed in Iraq are innocent and his description of them as martyrs is of no benefit. He is only trying to find justifications for his terrorism,” said Bahraini Shiite cleric Sheikh Ali Salman.

More than 400 people have been killed in an escalation of violence and suicide attacks since a new Iraqi government was named late last month. Zarqawi’s group has claimed responsibility for most of those attacks.

“Protecting religion is more important than protecting (Muslim) lives, honor or wealth,” said the man who sounded like Zarqawi. “The shedding of Muslim blood... is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad.”

Zarqawi’s message, which could not be independently verified, appeared aimed at winning Sunni Muslim support for the insurgency. Sunnis lost influence to Iraq’s majority Shiites after the US war toppled Saddam Hussein.

“It’s his opinion not ours. How can he kill a Muslim and say his is protecting Islam? It’s a sectarian fight or a civil war in Iraq. It is not jihad,” said 40-year-old Khaled Mohsen, waiting at a barber shop in downtown Cairo.

But Sheikh Hamza Mansour, head of Jordan’s opposition Islamic Action Front, said Zarqawi should not be singled out for killing innocents when US and British forces did the same. “Before the West asks about Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi they should ask about (US Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld, (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair and the other big criminals,” he said. “The main thing is that no innocent should be killed.”

Lebanon’s top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said: “Now in Iraq we see car bombs and the military operations are killing civilians and only kill a small percentage of occupiers. We reject and condemn all operations that kill civilians.

“I think this mentality, like this man and others, will not give Iraq peace. It is natural to say that the presence of occupation is encouraging this atmosphere.”

Egyptian professor of Shariah law Ahmed Hamad Ahmed said: “An unintentional mistake (of killing innocents) in an attack on occupying forces is not problematic.” But when the attacker knew civilians would be killed it went against Islamic law, he said.

“Any country that is occupied will have a resistance movement,” said Alaa Youssef, 67, a Baghdad soft drinks seller. “But you have to have an honorable resistance instead of one that kills and beheads innocent Iraqi civilians.”

In an interview published in Al-Hayat newspaper yesterday, Jordan’s King Abdallah accused Saddam Hussein of refusing to turn over Zarqawi before the US-led invasion. The king said Jordanian authorities had intelligence on Zarqawi entering Iraq from a “neighboring country,” and knew where he was and what he was doing. “We provided the Iraqi authorities with the precise intelligence we had, but these authorities did not respond favorably” to Amman’s requests.

The recent surge of attacks have raised concerns Iraq could erupt into a full-scale civil war. Some of those killed were Shiite and Sunni clerics. Recent discoveries of people killed execution-style and then dumped at various sites have stirred sectarian passions. Most victims were Shiites but some were Sunnis.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa voiced his concern over the killings of religious leaders and called on Iraqis to show restraint and avoid a sectarian bloodbath.