Yemenis sentenced to death for spate of attacks

A Yemeni court sentenced six suspected al-Qaeda men to death Monday for attacks that killed nine Spanish and Belgian tourists over the past two years.

Ten other defendants were sentenced to jail terms ranging from eight to 15 years. The defendants shouted religious chants of defiance and prayed as each sentence was announced.

The charge sheet included mortar attacks on the U.S. and Italian embassies and a foreign housing complex in Sanaa, all claimed by the al-Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as an attempted attack on an oil refinery.

The men, 11 Yemenis, four Syrians and a Saudi of Yemeni origin, were found guilty of attacks including one that killed seven Spanish tourists at the Queen of Sheba temple in Marib in 2007 and two Belgian tourists in the Hadramaut region in 2008.

The 16 were convicted of carrying out 13 armed attacks over the past two years on foreign targets, government establishments and oil facilities in Yemen, the ancestral homeland of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

These include a January 2008 attack that killed two Belgian women tourists, a March 2008 attack targeting the U.S. embassy and a rocket strike on a compound housing American oil workers.

In court, the defendants chanted "God is great" after the verdicts were announced. "We will liberate the land of Islam between Hadramut (southeast Yemen) and the Sham (Syria)," they shouted.

Relatives of the defendants were not allowed into the court, which deals with terror cases.

The sentences can be appealed, but the convicts did not declare in court if they will formally challenge the verdicts.

Three of the defendants in an earlier hearing pleaded innocent and demanded compensation for moral and financial damages. The others have also previously denied the charges against them.

Monday's sentence is the latest in a series of trials where a total of 190 suspected rebels are being tried in batches over the deadly fighting with the security forces that raged in Sanaa, between March and June last year.