SANAA, 19 May 2003 — Yemen announced a Cabinet reshuffle yesterday, with most prominent ministers, including the prime minister, keeping their posts after last month’s parliamentary election.
State television said President Ali Abdullah Saleh had appointed Abdul Qader Bagammal as prime minister to head the 35-member Cabinet, which includes 17 new ministers. As in the outgoing Cabinet which resigned after last month’s poll, all ministers in the new government belong to Saleh’s General People’s Congress. The interior, oil, defense, information and finance ministers all retained their portfolios.
The shuffle saw the outgoing Cabinet’s only woman minister, Minister of State for Human Rights Wheeba Far’e Al-Fakih, replaced by another woman, Amat Al-Alem Al-Sousouah, who has served as Yemen’s ambassador to the Netherlands.
The elections committee has yet to officially announce the final results of the April 27 polls, but sources had said that Saleh’s GPC won at least 225 seats in the 301-seat parliament, followed by the Islamist opposition Islah Party with at least 46 seats.
Meanwhile, an Islamist’s trial for the killing of a top Yemeni opposition politician resumed yesterday, the official SANA news agency reported. Ali Jarallah, whose trial opened on April 20, is accused of gunning down Jarallah Omar, deputy leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), at a party conference here in December.
Jarallah has been charged with premeditated murder and forming a ring whose aim was to murder politicians, journalists and others. The prosecution has called for the death penalty.
The court heard yesterday from 14 people accused of belonging to Jarallah’s alleged gang which prosecutors say was bent on killing socialists, Nasserists, and Muslims converted to Christianity.
Jarallah was a member of the Islamist Al-Islah Party, but had recently left the party, complaining it had gone soft on Westerners and minority Islamic sects. The YSP, now in opposition as is Al-Islah, governed southern Yemen before it was unified with the north in May 1990.
