SANAA, 3 April 2007 — A Yemeni state security court sentenced a tribesman to three years and two months in jail yesterday for blowing up a border marker on the border with Saudi Arabia.
The court found Ahmad Dhaifullah Al-Jalal, 41, guilty of bombing a concrete column erected as a border marker near his village in the Saada province on Yemen’s frontier with the Kingdom where government forces have been tackling a tribal revolt.
He was also convicted of planning to blow up other border markers as prosecutors said police had found in his possession 12 packets of TNT explosives and detonators which he planned to use to destroy the markers.
When the trial began last November, Al-Jalal told the court that he blew up the marker after authorities refused to remove it from land owned by fellow villagers.
Both the defendant and prosecution said they would appeal the verdict.
The marker was one of 824 markers that the Kingdom and Yemen planted along their 1,845-kilometer borderline after demarcation was completed in 2004. In 2000, the two countries signed a border treaty that ended a 66-year-old dispute over their unmarked frontiers.
