SANAA: A court of appeals yesterday sentenced a former air force pilot to death for the murder of a Jewish man last year. The court in the northwestern province of Amran convicted Abdel Aziz Yehia Hamoud Al-Abdi, 40, of premeditated murder of Jewish teacher Moshe Yaish Nahari in December. The Amran court yesterday threw out a lower court verdict that had convicted Al-Abdi of murder but said he was “mentally unstable” when he committed the crime and ordered him to pay $27,000 in blood money to the relatives of Nahari.
After judge Ahmed Al-Budani read the verdict yesterday, Al-Abdi told the court: “This sentence is an honor to me.”
The ruling could be appealed in the Supreme Court.
Nahari was one of the roughly 400 Jews still living in Yemen — mostly in Raydah, a small town north of the capital. Yemen was home to about 50,000 Jews in the early 1950s, but most emigrated to Israel. Ten Yemeni Jews moved to Israel last month after Nahari’s murder and a series of other attacks. Among the new immigrants was Said Ben Yisrael, who heads the Jewish community in Raydah.
