Two leading Islamist deputies were jailed in Jordan yesterday after they were found guilty of sowing national discord by visiting the family of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, after his death.
The verdict was announced after a two-week military trial in which state security prosecutors said they "stirred internal strife and national divisions" by paying their respects to the family of Jordanian-born Zarqawi after he was killed in a US air strike in June.
Sheikh Mohammad Abu Faris received a two-year sentence for allegedly describing Zarqawi as a "martyr" and Ali Abu Sukr, a prominent rights campaigner, was given a one-and-half year jail term while a third deputy, Jaafar Hourani, was acquitted.
They had denied the charges and said their visit was in line with Muslim tradition and did not mean they supported indiscriminate killings of civilians.
It was not immediately clear why Abu Fares and Abu Suqqar received a lesser term, but the court said their sentences would run from the day they were arrested, June 12, a day after their visit.
The three deputies are senior members of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Lawyers accused officials of rushing the trial through a court they considered unconstitutional during a parliamentary recess, while the accused had no parliamentary immunity.
After the verdict, delivered during a brief hearing, the trio again said they were innocent and their lawyers said they will appeal.
"God is my judge," Abu Fares said as he was led from the court.
"May this [verdict] be for the sake of Allah," Abu Suqqar said.
The trial of the popular deputies angered many ordinary Jordanians who widely sympathized with Zarqawi as a Muslim militant fighting occupying US troops.
US based rights group Human Rights Watch has strongly criticized their arrest, saying expressing condolences "to the family of a dead man, however murderous he might be, was not a crime and was not grounds for prosecution".
It said the case violated freedom of speech.
The government said that the visit was an affront to the feelings of most Jordanians, including relatives of 60 people killed in three hotel bombings in the capital Amman last November that Zarqawi claimed to have ordered.
The IAF accused the government of using the visit as a pretext to step up a campaign to curb the organization's growing influence.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate