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NEW YORK, Nov 17: Two Yemenis suspected of raising money for the Al Qaeda and the Hamas group were extradited to the United States from Germany and will make their first court appearance in New York this week, officials said.
Sheikh Mohammed Ali Hassan al Mouyad, a popular religious leader in Yemen, and his assistant, Mohammed Moshen Yahya Zayed, were arrested in Frankfurt in January after being lured to Germany in an FBI sting operation.
The German government agreed to the extradition under the conditions that the men may not be sentenced to death and may not be tried by a military court, a spokeswoman for the state prosecutor’s office said.
She said this meant the Yemenis could not be taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States has been holding hundreds of suspects indefinitely without access to lawyers, provoking fierce criticism from human rights groups.
The men were flown to New York from Frankfurt on Sunday aboard a US military plane, the spokeswoman said.
The US Justice Department said in a statement that the men would be produced in a court in Brooklyn. Prosecutors said the scholar had once boasted of giving Osama bin Laden millions of dollars collected at a Brooklyn mosque.
US prosecutors charged Al Mouyad and Zayed with “knowingly providing or conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization” designated by the State Department.
The men were flown out of Germany less than 72 hours after the country’s highest court rejected an appeal by Al Mouyad.
Lawyers for the scholar argued he was illegally “abducted” from Yemen in an FBI sting in which a contact lured him to Germany to discuss a financial donation.
The court agreed he had been tricked, but said he had entered Germany “on account of an autonomous decision and motivated by his own interests”.
Al Mouyad’s lawyers sent a last-ditch appeal on Friday to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but Germany approved extradition without waiting for the outcome.
US officials have called Al Mouyad a “significant figure” in fund-raising for Al Qaeda. The arrest of the popular leader provoked anti-German protests in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in January.
US NATIONALS: The United States on Monday urged its citizens in Yemen to step up personal security precautions, warning that the extradition from Germany of the Yemeni leader might spark anti-American actions.
The US embassy in Sanaa said Americans should “review and update their security procedures” and “maintain a high state of vigilance and caution”.
“It is possible that this extradition may have repercussions for US citizens residing in Yemen,” the embassy said in a notice to Americans.
The notice advised US citizens in Yemen “to exercise particular caution at locations frequented by foreigners”, naming the Sanaa Trade Center, US-affiliated franchises, restaurants and shops in the Haddah area of the capital as possible locations where anti-American sentiment might be expressed.
The same vigilance should be followed at similar locations in the port of Aden as well as at restaurants and hotels owned and frequented by expatriates across the country, it said.—AFP
