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| Arabia |
| Prosecutors claim airtight evidence against the Yanbu 11 |
| 2011-06-12 |
| [Arab News] Eleven men will stand trial Saturday in a Riyadh court accused of involvement in a series of terrorist attacks in Yanbu that killed six people and injured 25 others in 2004. Five Western expatriates and a Saudi National Guard sergeant died in the atrocity. The defendants were believed to be working for Al-Qaeda. The first summary court held its first session about a month ago to hear the list of charges against the defendants presented by the Prosecution and Investigations Commission. The charges included conspiring with perpetrators of the attacks and formation of a terrorist cell to plan future attacks on behalf of Al-Qaeda in the Kingdom. The men admitted to the charges and said they carried out their terrorist operations to avenge people in the Iraqi town of Fallujah killed by Americans. "We dun it and we're glad we dun it!" The court heard at the time how the defendants allegedly participated in planning, preparing and supporting the assault against innocent people working for a company in Yanbu. They are also accused of terrorizing citizens and expatriates in the city and using machine guns to fire on security guards and pedestrians. They confiscated cars at gunpoint and used the vehicles to target locations where their victims had gathered, the court heard. The men are also accused of providing the cell with money to buy arms and explosives, stealing chemical materials from a school which they used to make hand grenades and collecting arms and funds to support the cell. They were also alleged to have distributed CDs containing their wills and concealed the whereabouts of the wife of the criminal mastermind Mustapha Al-Ansari, as well as hiding other attackers involved and making bombs used in the attack. The attorney general said the prosecutors possessed evidence including arms, ammunition, documents, handmade grenades and legally documented confessions. He called for the death penalty against them. In the session last month, 10 of the defendants asked for lawyers to defend them and to reply in writing to the charges against them. One of them, Sultan. G, asked to be given the opportunity to defend himself. He said he had been the imam of a mosque in Al-Bawadi district in Jeddah for three years and that he had advised thousands of people who prayed with him against sedition. He initially denied knowing Al-Ansari, who was killed by the security forces, but later said he was his colleague at a school. "But I still prayed with him against sedition!" "How about the rest of the charges?" "We never prayed about those." He said Al-Ansari asked him to go and preach in Iraq because people there were ignorant about Islam. He said his only crime was to go to Iraq without official permission. He also claimed CDs in his possession when he was caught only contained recordings that he used in his Friday sermons. All the defendants are Saudis. Five of them hold university degrees, five have secondary school certificates and one is a graduate of a technical training institute. And you thought poverty and ignorance were the leading causes of terrorism... Al-Ansari went out to fight in Afghanistan in 1993. He stayed for a year before coming back to the Kingdom. He then went to Britannia and afterward Somalia where he stayed for six months and got married. He came back to the Kingdom in 1998 with a forged Somali passport. He stayed in the Kingdom for one month then went to Yemen where he stayed for four years and got married again. He returned to the Kingdom in 2002, crossing the border by foot. He was known for his connections with Saad Al-Fakeeh and Muhammad Al-Masaari, two Saudi opponents who were living abroad, but there was no proof he was a member of Al-Qaeda or had any connections with its leaders even though he believed in its ideology. |
| Posted by:Fred |