Kuwaiti sentenced to death for killing editor

A Kuwaiti court sentenced to death a police officer on Sunday for gunning down a female editor in a crowded street in the Muslim conservative state.

The criminal court found Lt-Colonel Khaled Al Azmi guilty of the March 2001 murder of journalist and veteran women's rights campaigner Hedayah Sultan Al Salem. Azmi can appeal.

The case shocked many in the small country where women are very active in society, compared with some neighbouring Gulf Arab states.

Witnesses at the time said a man stepped out of a vehicle and fired at Salem as her Rolls-Royce waited in a Kuwait City street.

Former oil minister Ali Al Baghli, a lawyer representing the family of the slain journalist, last year told Reuters that Azmi had apparently said he attacked the editor for what he saw as an insult to his Awazm tribe in an article in her Al Majaless magazine in July 2000.

Salem had said in the article that in the 1930s Kuwaitis used to hire female dancers from areas outside Kuwait City and "before that from Al Awazm alley" as it was "improper for (city) girls to dance".