SANAA: A small group of Yemeni Jews demonstrated on Monday in Sanaa demanding a final ruling against a Yemeni man sentenced to death last year for killing a Jewish father-of-nine in 2008.
An appeals court in Amran, north of the capital, had in June last year sentenced Abdel Aziz Yahia Al-Abdi, 39, to death by firing squad for the murder of Masha Yaish Nahari, a member of Yemen’s tiny Jewish community, in the town of Raydah, but the sentence must be confirmed by the supreme court.
Around 20 demonstrators gathered outside the supreme court and the ministry of justice demanding the speeding up of the court process, an AFP correspondent reported.
Justice minister Ghazi Al-Aghbari told representatives of the demonstrators that the process was taking time due to the high number of cases being revised by the supreme court.
The appeals court had turned over a lower court verdict that ordered Abdi to only pay $27,500 in blood money in lieu of execution after medical reports found he was "mentally abnormal."
Abdi killed his wife five years ago but was spared prison at the time when he was ruled to be mentally unstable.
A former air force pilot, Abdi had repeatedly said he carried out the murder of Nahari after warning Yemeni Jews that he would kill them unless they converted to Islam, the court heard during his trial in February last year.
The case stoked fear in Yemen’s remaining Jewish community of only around 400 people, most of whom live in the Amran area.
In 1948, the country’s Jewish community numbered some 60,000. But in the three years following the creation of the Jewish state that year, more than 48,000 emigrated to Israel.
The community continued to dwindle in subsequent decades and by the early 1990s it numbered only around 1,000 people.
The lifting of a longstanding travel ban in 1993 sparked a fresh exodus.
