Feb. 27
YEMEN----execution
Yemen Executes Man for 2002 Murder of Americans
A Yemeni firing squad executed on Monday a man convicted of killing 3 U.S.
Christian missionaries in the country in 2002, the state news agency said.
The Saba news agency said Abed Abdel Razzak Kamel was put to death in the
southern Ibb province, where he had shot dead a doctor and her two
colleagues at a Baptist mission hospital.
Kamel had said that he had committed the killings to get closer to God and
take revenge on Christians and Americans.
Martha Myers, 57, a physician from Alabama, William Koehn, 60, an
administrator from Texas and Kathleen Gariety, 53, a purchasing agent from
Wisconsin were all buried in Yemen.
The killings occurred at a time of strong anti-U.S. sentiment in Yemen
over U.S. support for Israel, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and the
buildup to the Iraq war.
Kamel's lawyers had said the murders were not politically motivated, but
officials say he was linked to a member of the Islamist opposition Islah
party who was also executed last year for gunning down another politician.
Yemen, the ancestral home of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, has cracked
down on Islamist militants and cooperates with the U.S. war on terrorism.
(source: Reuters)
CHINA:
China to open more death penalty cases to public
China is to hold open trials for death penalty appeals in an effort to
better regulate executions, a legal scholar said on Monday.
>From the second half of 2006, all death penalty appeals which go to a
provincial high court will be heard publicly, a departure from the usual
practice of closed reviews and probes, said Liu Renwen, a scholar at the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
With the judicial system under scrutiny after a series of widely
publicised wrongful convictions, the Supreme Court has also moved to
reclaim its right to final review of death sentences, but Liu said the
policy was meeting opposition from lower courts.
"When the Supreme Court can take this power back is still a question," Liu
told foreign correspondents.
"Local governments think it is a good tool to control public security. If
they lose such power they think of course it would not be good," he said.
The top court has set up three branch courts to conduct reviews, a move
officials say could cut executions by 30 %.
But experts say it is still too short-staffed to handle all death penalty
cases, Liu said making more death penalty trials public was another way of
controlling the legal process for cases that could result in execution.
Several areas, including Beijing and Shanghai and the southern province of
Hainan, have already begun to hear appeals in public trials, Xinhua news
agency has reported.
Some 68 crimes in China can incur the death penalty, about half of which
are non-violent offences, including corruption and financial crimes, Liu
said.
Executions in China are carried out by a bullet to the head or by lethal
injection.
(source: Reuters)
