SANAA, 28 February 2006 — Yemeni authorities executed yesterday a man convicted of murdering three American Christian missionaries in an attack on a Baptist hospital in southern Yemen in 2002.
Aabid Abdur-Razzak Kamil, 35, was sentenced to death in May 2003 after he was convicted of killing the three Americans on Dec. 30, 2002. He reportedly entered the hospital and gunned down two physicians and an administrator. A fourth missionary was injured in the attack.
Kamil was executed by a firing squad at the central prison in Ibb province, some 190 kilometers south of Sanaa, in the presence of prosecution representatives and lawyers, said the sources.
Judicial sources said the verdict, upheld by an appeals court in December 2003, was affirmed by President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Saturday. Saleh also heads the country’s Supreme Judicial Council.
During the trial, Kamil admitted to the crime, and told the court he was defending Islam when he killed the three missionaries.
Yemeni officials have said that Kamil was a member of a militant group that had planned to assassinate secular politicians and foreign missionaries working in the Arab country.
They said the group was led by the radical preacher Ali Ahmad Jarallah, who was executed last November after a court convicted him of murdering a senior opposition politician on Dec. 29, 2002, just one day before Kamil killed the three Americans.
Meanwhile, a Sanaa state security court yesterday convicted three Yemeni men repatriated from the US military prison in Guantanamo last year of forgery and sentenced two of them to three and a half years in jail. The court found the three men guilty of falsifying official passport and identity documents, there were however, no terrorism charges involved. Two of the men, Muhammad Faraj Ba-Shumaila and Salah Nassir Salim Qarw, were sentenced to three-and-a-half-years in prison each.
Presiding judge Najeeb Al-Qadri ordered the immediate release of the third convict, Muhammad Abdullah Al-Assad, saying that he had already served equivalent time in detention outside the country.
The three men had been detained at the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba before they were handed over to Yemen in May 2005.
