A suspected al-Qaida militant was sentenced to death May 10 for killing three U.S. missionaries at a Southern Baptist run hospital in Yemen.
The lawyer for Abed Abdul Razak Kamel, 30, said a Yemeni court sentenced his client in the Dec. 30 shooting deaths of Martha C. Myers of Montgomery, Kathleen A. Gariety of Wauwatosa, Wis., and William E. Koehn, a native of Cimarron, Kan., the Associated Press reported.
Donald W. Caswell of Levelland, Texas, was wounded in the attack.
The verdict was announced in Jibla, 125 miles south of the Yemeni capital of San’a, where the killings took place.
Kamel pleaded not guilty. His lawyer, Mahrous Oqba, told the AP that he will appeal the verdict because he believes it violated Islamic law.
The hospital’s director, Abdel Karim Hassan, welcomed the death sentence but said, “He deserves even worse.”
Kamel said at an April 20 court hearing that he coordinated the attack with Ali al-Jarallah, another suspected Muslim extremist.
Jarallah is also accused of killing a Yemeni politician two days before the attack on the Jibla hospital.
Yemini security officials say that they believe both men belonged to a terrorist cell that has ties to al-Qaida.
Kamel said he killed the missionaries “out of a religious duty…and in revenge from those who converted Muslims from their religion and made them unbelievers.”
Jibla residents have said the Americans never talk about religion.
Yemeni law bars non-Muslims from proselytizing the country, which is overwhelmingly Muslim.
(RNS)
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