AMMAN, 24 May 2007 — Jordan’s King Abdallah has commuted the death sentence of an Al-Qaeda-linked Saudi national convicted of plotting to carry out acts of terrorism in Jordan, judicial sources said yesterday.
“The monarch has issued a decree reducing the death penalty passed on the Saudi citizen Fahd Noman Al-Fuhaiqi to life imprisonment with hard labor,” the sources said.
Jordan’s State Security Court decided in December 2005 that Fuhaiqi and two other defendants be hanged after finding them guilty of masterminding bombings at the check posts on the two sides of the Iraqi-Jordanian border in October 2004.
The Iraqi branch of Al-Qaeda had detonated two car bombs at Iraq’s border post of Traibele, but Fuhaiqi failed to carry out bombing at the Jordan’s Karameh post and was arrested, according to the charges list.
The Court of Cassation, Jordan’s highest tribunal, later upheld the death penalty against Fuhaiqi and the other two defendants who were tried in absentia — Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi and Ismail Abu Oudeh, better known for his nom de guerre Abu Abdul Rahman Al-Afghani. Zarqawi was killed in a US air strike in Iraq in 2006.
Meanwhile, Jordanian authorities have arrested four people, including two members of the Islamic Action Front, in connection with a suspected plot to carry out acts of terrorism, the government’s official spokesman Nasser Judeh said yesterday.
