The trial of the British men in Aden provided my best source of new clues. Fortunately, the trial and the political impact it was having in Britain continued to be covered in depth by the British press, whose reports I tracked on various websites.
In the second session of the trial, the prosecution brought forward its witnesses. The first was the owner of a car-hire agency in Aden, who confirmed that Mohsin Ghalain (Abu Hamza’s stepson) had hired a white Daewoo from him. Police witnesses then testified that at midnight on 23 December 1998, Malik Harhara was driving the Daewoo from the direction of Abyan and as he approached a traffic island on the outskirts of Aden was apprehended by a police officer, ostensibly for driving the wrong way around the roundabout. In the car with Harhara were Mohsin Ghalain and Sarmad Ahmed, whose name and cell-phone number were provided as the contact on the Supporters of Sharia website. When the police officer asked for the men’s identity papers and began to question them, Harhara suddenly drove off. Fleeing the police checkpoint, the three Britons raced towards Aden with the police in pursuit. After taking a wrong turn, they became lost in Aden’s backstreets and eventually became trapped in a busy night market. The men abandoned the car and ran off.
According to the police officers, the trunk of the car was found to be full of weapons and explosives, which were displayed in court. Observers noted that the evidence was not enclosed in any protective plastic nor were the exhibit items numbered. Court officials and even witnesses were allowed to handle the exhibits freely. There was no hard evidence that the weapons and bomb-making equipment displayed in the courtroom had come from the defendants’ rental car – no fingerprints to prove the defendants had ever handled the goods.
Several aspects of the story about how the Britons were apprehended did not ring true. Having spent a week on Yemeni roads myself, it seemed highly unlikely to me that a police officer would bother to pull over a vehicle at midnight for something as mundane as going the wrong way around a traffic island. In a typical Yemeni town, locals showed little regard for traffic rules, and I couldn’t imagine a policeman would pay the slightest attention to such a minor infringement. The fact that the car happened to be stashed with weapons and explosives seemed too much of a coincidence.
I was also suspicious of the reported speed with which the police located the two hotels where the defendants were staying. Apparently, three of them were found in their hotel and arrested in a little more than two hours after the rental car was abandoned. Three more were located in another hotel less than twenty-four hours later. Were the Yemeni police really that efficient? There had to be more to the story than was coming out in the press reports of the trial.
Through March and April, the trial continued in erratically scheduled sessions. The prosecution introduced a videotape showing three of the defendants handling weapons and demonstrating booby traps. The tape was apparently recorded in Albania, a predominantly Muslim country bordering the conflict in Kosovo. The tape suggested that Butt, Ghalain and Abu Hamza’s son, Kamel Jr, had engaged in weapons training. Although it hardly proved the defendants guilty of a bomb plot in Yemen, it did make at least three of them look not quite the innocent, fun-loving students of Islam they claimed to be. Mohsin Ghalain explained the tape was simply a souvenir of a trip to Albania. Most tourists would have settled for T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with ‘Albania’. Of course, most tourists would not have been in Albania in the first place, but I am hardly in a position to criticise another person’s choice of holiday destination.
More damaging to the defendants were their signed confessions. I located an English translation of these on the Yemen Times website. Essentially, the defendants admitted participating in training at camps operated by Abu Hassan and that they were paid by Hassan to conduct attacks on facilities in Aden during the Christians’ Christmas and New Year holidays. Even one of their defence lawyers described the admissions as ‘pretty damning’. The defendants formally retracted the confessions on the grounds that they had been forced to write and sign them through torture. Although the Yemeni authorities had repeatedly denied British government requests that its own doctors examine the men, the judge authorised a new medical committee to investigate the torture allegations. This committee, made up of a Dutch doctor and two Yemenis, informed the court that it could find no evidence of torture. Of course, this was now several months after the confessions were obtained and any physical injuries may well have healed.
With long, unpredictable adjournments in the ongoing trial of the Britons, the British press coverage of events in Yemen declined and public interest in the fate of the defendants waned. Even the Muslim community in Britain was less convinced that these ‘poor boys’ were quite as innocent as it had first assumed. Muslim businesses and charities gradually discontinued their financial support of a ‘Justice for Britons in Yemen’ initiative and distanced themselves from the case. Only close family members continued the fight by maintaining their demands on the Foreign Office and urging the British government to intercede with authorities in Yemen.
On 9 August 1999, the judge who had presided over the six-month trial of the eight British and two Algerian defendants announced his verdict. All ten were found guilty of conspiracy to form an armed gang. Several were also convicted of planning to bomb a number of locations in Aden. Sentences varied in accordance with degree of complicity. Malik Harhara and Mohsin Ghalain, judged to be the ringleaders, received sentences of seven years. Shahid Butt, Sarmad Ahmed and the two Algerians were sentenced to five years each. Mohammed Mustafa Kamel received a three-year sentence, which in part reflected his age. The remaining defendants – Ghulam Hussein, Ayaz Hussein, and Shazad Nabi – were considered to have played minor roles and were sentenced to time already served.
The guilty verdicts and the sentences produced a renewed outcry from relatives and supporters in Britain. According to Shahid Butt’s brother, the trial was ‘a complete joke. They never had a chance. They are innocent.’ But while a small core of relatives, human rights activists and Muslim leaders continued to express their belief in the men’s innocence, public opinion had shifted.
Unlike the original arrests, the guilty verdict did not generate heated press conferences. There were no rallies or marches on the Yemeni embassy or the Foreign Office. However, British Prime Minister Tony Blair did send a letter to Yemen’s President Salih, expressing his concern over the use of torture and its apparent role in producing a guilty verdict. The Foreign Office offered to propose to the Yemeni authorities that the men serve their sentences in a British jail, but the families rejected that on the basis it implied the men were indeed guilty and deserving of time in prison. Appeals of the verdicts and sentences were filed by the defence lawyers, but to no avail. The three defendants who had already served their time were free to leave Yemen. The remaining five Britons and their two Algerian companions remained in Aden’s al-Mansoor prison, the place where I would later meet them.