AMRAN, Yemen: The prosecution demanded the death sentence yesterday for a Yemeni who has boasted of killing a Jewish compatriot north of the capital Sanaa late last year.
The court set March 2 as the date for its verdict against Abdul Aziz Yahya Al-Abdi, 39, who admitted in December to shooting dead Masha Yaeish Al-Nahari in the town of Raydah in Amran province.
Abdi, peering from the dock into the court through an iron gate, showed no remorse for his actions and repeatedly interrupted the prosecutor during the hearing to renew his confession.
The former air force pilot has repeatedly said he carried out the murder after warning Yemeni Jews that he would kill them unless they converted to Islam. “I told them in a letter that they should either convert to Islam or leave Yemen, or I would kill them,” he said at an earlier hearing.
The small courtroom was packed with several dozen other members of Abdi’s Kharef tribe.
The only Jewish people present were the victim’s father and widow — also the only woman in the courtroom.
Nahari’s father said Abdi accosted his son, with whom he was not acquainted, near the victim’s home and insisted that he convert to Islam. Nahari asked to be left alone but Abdi opened fire with a submachine gun until he was riddled with bullets, the bereaved father said.
Some 250 of Yemen’s remaining Jewish minority of around 400 live in Amran.
In 1948, the country’s Jewish community numbered some 60,000. But in the three years following the creation of the Jewish state that year, more than 48,000 emigrated to Israel.
The community continued to dwindle in subsequent decades and by the early 1990s it numbered only around 1,000 people.
The lifting of a longstanding travel ban in 1993 sparked a fresh exodus.
