Middle East News

Jordan court cancels verdict against suspected killer of US diplomat

May 13, 2008, 9:56 GMT

Amman - Jordan's Cassation Court has overturned a 10-year prison sentence issued in November 2007 by the State Security Court (SSC) against Libyan Muammar Jaghbir for his role in the assassination of a US diplomat in Amman in 2002, judicial sources said Tuesday. The higher court ruled that the SSC should hear all the witnesses in the case before issuing its verdict, the sources added. The SSC sentenced Jaghbir to death in absentia in 2004. Three years later, the tribunal commuted his death sentence after amending the original charge of 'plotting subversive acts that led to the death of an individual' to 'plotting terrorist attacks'. The judicial sources said that the second SSC ruling was based on evidence the court heard in 2004 while Jaghbir was being tried in absentia. The defendant was arrested in Iraq in May 2004 by US forces and handed over to the Jordanian authorities. Following the November 29 verdict, his lawyer Fathi Daradkeh told reporters that the sentence was harsh and that his client was a 'scapegoat because the verdict was meant to impose the American and Israeli vision on the situation in our region.' The charge sheet said Jaghbir was given 44,000 dollars by the late Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian fugitive who was then in charge of al-Qaeda branch in Iraq, to finance subversive acts inside Jordan. The US diplomat Lawrence Foley was gunned down outside his Amman home on October 28, 2002. Jaghbir was also sentenced to death by the SSC in July 2007 for his role in the 2003 car bombing of the Jordanian embassy in Iraq which killed at least 18 people. Al-Zarqawi was killed in a US airstrike inside Iraq in June 2006.

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