AMMAN, 28 January 2007 — Jordan’s Court of Cassation has upheld the death penalty passed earlier on an Iraqi woman for her role in the Nov. 9, 2005, triple Amman hotel bombings, judicial sources said yesterday. “The Court of Cassation has found the verdict passed earlier by the State Security Court against Sajida Al-Rishawi to be based on sound legal basis,” the sources said.
Rishawi, 35, was found by the SSC last November to be guilty of plotting acts of terrorism that led to the death of human beings. She confessed over the state-run Jordan TV shortly after her arrest in November 2005 to have been part of the suicide gang that carried out the explosions at three Amman hotels, killing 60 people and wounding more than 90.
Sajida also conceded that she was accompanying her husband who blew up himself at a wedding party that was in process at the Radisson SAS hotel, but alleged that her explosive belt failed to detonate.
In the same case, the SSC also passed death sentences on seven other defendants who were tried in absentia, including the Jordanian fugitive Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, who was killed in a US airstrike inside Iraq on June 8 last year. Sajida’s death sentence should now receive the consent of King Abdullah II before she is hanged, judicial sources said.
Sajida entered a hotel ballroom with her husband, both strapped with explosives belts. Her husband set off his belt, ripping through a wedding party in the room. Initially, Sajida said in a televised confession that her own belt failed to detonate and she fled, but she later told her trial that she was an unwilling participant in the attacks and never tried to set off her blast.
Sajida, one of seven defendants in the case, was the first woman sentenced to death in Jordan on terrorism charges. The other six defendants remain at large and were tried in absentia last year in Jordan’s military court.
Sajida had appealed her sentence. But Jordan’s appeals court said it “ratified” the military court’s death sentence because Sajida was “guilty beyond doubt of possessing explosives and having had the intention and the will to carry out terrorist attacks whose outcome is destruction and death.”
