SANAA, 11 May 2003 — A Yemeni was sentenced to death by a court in the southern city of Ibb yesterday for the murder of three US missionaries last December in the nearby town of Jibla, court officials said.
Abed Abdul Razzak Al-Kamel, who was also convicted of wounding a fourth missionary, has 15 days to appeal the verdict from the court of first instance in Ibb, a provincial capital 220 km south of Sanaa. He was arrested immediately after the shooting of the Americans, the first major anti-US attack in Yemen since the October 2000 assault on the USS Cole in the southern port of Aden that left 17 American sailors dead.
Police told the trial that Al-Kamel, 30, had confessed to being a member of an Islamist cell and that the missionaries deserved to die because they had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Prosecutors had demanded that Al-Kamel be given the death penalty, as he was charged with premeditated murder.
The three missionaries were shot dead in a Baptist hospital in Jibla on Dec. 30 where they had worked for many years. The US Embassy in Sanaa expressed outrage at the killings and demanded that the culprits be punished. “We condemn the attack on US citizens... We call on the Yemeni government to bring those responsible to justice,” the embassy said on the day of the attack.
