YEMEN. COURT UPHOLDS DEATH PENALTY AGAINST IMAM

a Yemeni appeals court upheld a death sentence against Ali Ahmed Jarallah, an Islamist imam convicted of murdering a senior opposition leader in 2002.
Jarallah confessed in July 2003 that he had acted alone in shooting dead Jarallah Omar, deputy leader of the opposition Yemeni Socialist Party, at a party conference in Sanaa.
Jarallah immediately blasted the verdict as unfair, saying the killing was part of a jihad or holy war against converts to Christianity and infidels.
The appeals court acquitted 10 others who had previously been sentenced to prison terms of three to 10 years for belonging to a gang that the cleric allegedly created to murder socialists, Arab nationalists and converts to Christianity.
Jarallah was a former member of Yemen's Islamist Al-Islah Party who quit the party shortly before the killing, complaining it had gone soft on Westerners and minority Islamic sects. The Socialist party governed southern Yemen before it was unified with the north in 1990.