Yemen Monitor/News Room
A court run by the Houthi group in the capital Sana’a on Saturday sentenced 44 people to death on charges of spying for the Saudi-led Arab coalition that has been fighting in Yemen since 2015.
Yemeni lawyer Abdulmajeed Sabra said in a post on his Facebook account that “the specialized criminal court of first instance in Sana’a has issued a death sentence against 44 people, in the criminal case pending before the court No. (25) for the year 1445 AH, in which 49 people are accused.”
He added that among those sentenced to death were 16 people whom the court tried in absentia, while it sentenced 4 others to imprisonment, namely: Mohamed Al-Masqari, Hamdi Al-Omari, Nasser Al-Shanifi, and Waddah Al-Hamiqani, and returned the file of the accused Ahmed Al-Zarari to the prosecution.
He explained that the detainees on the case were subjected to “the most severe forms of physical and psychological torture and remained forcibly disappeared in solitary confinement for nine full months, deprived of visits and communication.”
Sabra said that the Houthi group did not guarantee them the right to a fair trial, nor did it allow lawyers to access the case file to defend them.
He pointed out that the Houthi group is exploiting this court (the specialized criminal court) to achieve political gains at the expense of humanitarian issues.
The new death sentences come in conjunction with Houthi accusations against Saudi Arabia of being behind the decisions of the Central Bank of Yemen in Aden, to ban banks under the control of the group, which refused to move their headquarters from Sana’a to Aden.
