A Yemeni was sentenced to death by a court in the southern city of Ibb Saturday, May 10, for the murder of three U.S. missionaries last December in the nearby town of Jibla. Abed Abdulrazzak al-Kamel, also convicted of wounding a fourth missionary, has 15 days to appeal the verdict. He was arrested immediately after the shooting of the Americans, the first major anti-U.S. attack in Yemen since the October 2000 assault on the USS Cole in the southern port of Aden that left 17 American sailors dead. Police told the trial that Kamel, 30, had confessed to being a member of an Islamic cell and that the missionaries deserved to die because they had tried to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Kamel condemned the verdict, saying he should have been tried by an Islamic court and not a civil court. His lawyer said he would appeal against the sentence, which is usually enforced by firing squad. U.S. Baptists have run Jibla hospital since the 1960s. "The ruling is a political one and violates Islamic Sharia law," Kamel told the court in Ebb province, according to the BBC online news service. Kamel was a student at Yemen's al-Iman university - which was briefly closed last year after allegations that it was a hotbed of âIslamic militancyâ.
| "There ain't nothin' in the Koran that says you can't kill Christians! What kinda Muslims are you guys?" |
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