SANAA, 29 July 2004 — The families of 17 American sailors killed in the October 2000 bombing of the US destroyer Cole in Aden port have mandated the US Embassy in Sanaa to represent them during the trial of the bombing suspects, a court here heard yesterday.
The prosecutor handed the court a document containing the mandate to the embassy’s legal attaché, who was present at the hearing, held amid tight security.
Six militants are being tried on charges of carrying out the attack, including the chief suspect, Abdel Rahim Al-Nashiri, who is being tried in absentia.
The court has named a lawyer for Nashiri, who was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in October 2002 and handed over to the United States.
Only four of the five other defendants were present at yesterday’s hearing. The fifth is undergoing treatment for gunshot wounds in the leg sustained when he was arrested by security forces in March.
One of the defense lawyers, Khaled Al-Anzi, was expelled by Judge Najib Qadiri, after he told the court he was appealing the verdict before it is out.
Anzi was responding to the court’s refusal to give defense lawyers a copy of the documents concerning the case, allowing them only to look at the file. But Judge Qadiri said his questioning of the integrity of the justice system was an affront to the court.
One of the defendants was also expelled on grounds of improper conduct.
Two prosecution witnesses took the stand yesterday. One said Nashiri had rented his house in Aden under a different name one year before the attack, while the second said he rented the suspects a crane with which the boat used to attack the Cole was lifted. Both claimed the attack had been in the works since mid-1999.
But a defense lawyer, Abdul Aziz Al-Samawi, challenged the evidence linking the five defendants in custody to the Cole attack.
The next hearing, the fifth in the case, was set for next Wednesday.
Yemen’s public prosecutor has issued an arrest warrant for Nashiri, who was described at the time of his arrest in the UAE as chief of naval operations for the Al-Qaeda network and its operations chief in the Arabian Gulf.
Born in Saudi Arabia of Yemeni descent, Nashiri is also suspected of involvement in attacks against the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 that killed 224 people, and in the October 2002 attack on the French supertanker Limburg off south Yemen in which one Bulgarian crew member was killed and 12 were wounded.
He and the five others were charged on July 7 of carrying out the Cole bombing, which was claimed by Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden. They were also charged with membership of Al-Qaeda.
