SANAA, 9 August 2005 — A Yemeni court yesterday sentenced six men, including an Iraqi and two Syrians, to jail terms ranging from two to four years after convicting them of planning to attack Western embassies.
The six men were part of an eight-member Al-Qaeda cell called the “Tawheed Brigades”. Two other defendants were acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
The eight were charged with planning to attack the British and Italian embassies and a French cultural center in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
The court sentenced the alleged ringleader Anwar Baian Al-Jilani to four years in prison. Two Yemeni accomplices, Khaled Muhammad Al-Butani and Abdul Rahman Basurra were given 38 and 40 months in jail, respectively. A third Yemeni Umran Al-Faqih was sentenced to two-year suspended prison term.
Two Syrian brothers, Muhammad and Ahmad Abdul Wahab Khiti, received 38-month jail term each. The verdict, read out by the court’s presiding Judge Najeeb Al-Qadri, said that “the evidence supported charges (against the six convicts) and showed organized preparations to carry out bombings targeting foreign diplomatic missions.”
Qadri found two Yemenis Majid Mizan and Salah Muhammad Othman innocent, saying the prosecution failed to provide sufficient evidence against them.
Prosecutors have submitted to the court documents seized by police showing that the group had also planned to attack military bases in Saudi Arabia, as well as American civilians, Western companies, restaurants and schools in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
Among the documents were maps and alleged attack plans and orders for explosives and rocket-propelled grenades that would have been allegedly supplied by Saudi comrades. When the trial began on March 21, only three of the defendants pleaded guilty for planning to attack on the British Embassy, but they and the other five suspects denied involvement in a conspiracy to blow up the Italian embassy or the French center.
Meanwhile, armed tribesmen seeking the release of an imprisoned fellow clansman kidnapped three Spanish tourists in southeastern Yemen on Sunday for several hours, security sources said yesterday.
The kidnappers who belong to the Al Abdallah tribe took the three tourists; two men and a woman hostages for nearly 12 hours in the southeastern province of Shabwa, some 460 kilometers from Sana’a, said the sources.
The trio were freed after provincial officials, including the governor Ali Al-Rassas, intervened and negotiated with the hostage takers who asked authorities to free a relative jailed over criminal charge in the southern province of Aden, they said.
