Al Qaida suspects to go on trial soon

Sanaa: Six Al Qaida suspects, including two men who were detained in Yemen, are to go on trial very soon, official sources said yesterday.

Mohammad Hamdi Al Ahdal (Abu Asem) one of the suspects to be held in Yemen, confessed he used to receive large amounts of cash through people in Kuwait and in other countries, the state-run 26 September net quoted an unidentified security official as saying.

His companion Ghalib Al Zaydi, also detained, was helping Al Ahdal whose left hand is paralysed and left leg is amputated. He was injured in Chechnya in a battle with Jehadists. Al Ahdal and Al Zaydi were both detained in Sanaa in December 2003.

The other four accused are identified as Waleed Shaher Al Qadsi, Salem Qaro, Mohammad Abdullah Al Asad, and Mohammad Faraj Ba Shumailah.

"Yemen has received files of these four from the United States after they spent a long time in Guantanamo," the sources said.

However, the sources pointed out that these four were not directly involved in terrorist acts.

One of these four, Waleed Shaher Al Qadasi, has been in a Yemeni prison for about two years. The other three were handed to Yemen by the US government last year.

"The investigations, so far, have not revealed that these four were directly involved in terrorist acts, but they confessed to forging travel documents and identification cards for people from Al Qaida," the official sources said.

Al Ahdal would distribute the money to the families of detainees and those who were killed, the official said.

After a long search Al Ahdal, who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1971, was detained in an apartment in Sanaa while he was preparing for his second marriage, according to official sources.

Al Ahdal, who had a business in honey and ran a charity, was imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for 14 months before being deported to Yemen in 2001. He is married and has four children. The Yemeni security authorities say that they thwarted Al Ahdal's plan to carry out terrorist acts against American and western interests in Yemen.

According to official sources, Al Ahdal played a major role with his partner, Qaed Senyan Al Harithi (killed by an unmanned US plane in 2002) in the attacks on the USS Cole in October 2000, and the French oil Supertanker in 2002 in addition to other acts of sabotage in the country.

- The writer is a journalist based in Saana