YEMEN: EXECUTION OF TWO OPPOSITIONISTS

two Yemeni oppositionists, Khalid Nahshal and Abdu Nahshal, were executed in a political case.
The defendants were among 32 people charged with killing at least one government official during the presidential elections in September 2006 in an exchange of fire between a group of armed men loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh and those who supported the opposition candidate Faisal Bin Shamlan.
The alliance of Yemen's main opposition parties condemned the execution. Spokesman of the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) Abdu Al-Odaini said the execution of Khalid Nahshal and Abdu Nahshal was a political retaliation due to their support to the opposition candidate in 2006 presidential elections. The JMP had called Vice President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi to suspend this execution, stressing that it was a political case that should be included in the immunity law granted to President Saleh.
"Khalid Nahshal and Abdu Nahshal were executed by a political decision, not by a judicial sentence," said Abdul-Rahman Barman, the executive director of Hood, a Yemeni human rights organization. He further said that the outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his followers put pressures on the judiciary to issue such unfair sentence. He cited that this case did not have any basic prosecution standards, affirming that witnesses were not able to testify at trial and they were beaten and assaulted. "This trial was motivated by political retaliation, the law of the jungle, and it lacked transparency and justice."