[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 28


UNITED ARAB EMIRATES:

Court upholds death penalty


The Criminal Appeal Court on Tuesday upheld the death penalty pronounced
by the emirate's Criminal Court for a man who murdered his lover with an
axe.

A senior court official said the 27-year-old Pakistani illegal immigrant,
Mohammad Asad, will remain behind bars until he is executed.

The relatives of the Indian woman victim demanded that the Criminal Appeal
Court uphold the death sentence given to the killer, refusing the blood
money in return for giving up their right to the death penalty.

Mohammad Asad, who was earlier deported from the UAE, claimed to have had
an illicit relationship with the victim.

The man confessed to having heard that his lover was the reason for his
deportation and he was determined to return to the UAE to take revenge.

He managed to infiltrate into the UAE and rang the woman demanding to meet
her.

They argued and he grabbed an axe and hit the woman on her chest, which
caused severe injuries to her lung before throwing her from the roof.

Police caught him escaping while he was wearing clothes of the victim's
husband.

They found her jewellery and mobile phone in his possession and went to
investigate her house, where they found her body.

(source: Gulf News)






SYRIA:

A German Islamist Faces Death Penalty in Syria


For the 1st time, German diplomats have now been permitted to visit
Syrian-born German citizen Mohammed Zammar in prison. Zammar faces the
death penalty in Damascus, and the case against him is based in part on
evidence from Germany.

The muezzin at the Omajjaden Mosque had just called the faithful to
evening prayers when the telephone rang at the German embassy in Damascus.
The caller, an official with the Syrian Foreign Ministry, was clearly in a
hurry. He was calling to discuss an offer from his government, but the
Germans, he said, would have to act quickly -- preferably right away. It
was Tuesday, Nov. 7.

A consular official, following the Syrian's instructions, called for a car
and drove north along a country road. Her destination, the Saidnaya Prison
in a small mountain village outside Damascus, has three wings designed
like the spokes on the famed Mercedes star.

At about 8 p.m., the diplomat met with a man who has since become an
international symbol of what happens when questionable methods are
employed in the war against terror. The prisoner was Syrian-born German
citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 45, a friend of the Sept. 11 pilots who
had lived in Hamburg. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA had
Zammar abducted and taken to Syria where, according to fellow prisoners,
he was tortured.

The meeting was the first time a representative of the German government
met with the now-prominent prisoner since German security officials
interrogated Zammar under dubious circumstances in November 2002. His fate
and the questionable role played by German authorities who had notified
the Americans of Zammar's travel plans in the first place, has now become
the subject of a government investigation in Berlin.

Zammar met with the German diplomat for one hour. Al-Qaida detainees are
kept in a wing of the prison that is isolated from the rest of the
facility and dubbed the "black gate" by other prisoners. At the end of the
conversation, Zammar asked the German diplomat for winter clothing and
some money. A lawyer, he added, would also be helpful -- not an
unreasonable request for someone who has been deprived of legal counsel
for almost 5 years now.

Indeed, the Islamist, who has been a German citizen since 1982, is sorely
in need of legal representation. Zammar's case goes to trial in Damascus
next Sunday, when he will be accused of membership in a brutal
organization, the Attar wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Prosecutors will
also charge him with "attending training camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia"
and "jihadist ambitions" -- offences for which the standard penalty is
death. This is where things become uncomfortable for the German
government, because it was German investigators who supplied important
pieces of evidence against Zammar in the 1st place.

A fair trial is unlikely

The trial will take place before Syria's Supreme State Security Court, a
notorious special tribunal in Damascus that deals exclusively with
political cases. Chances are slim that Zammar will get a fair trial.
According to human rights organization Amnesty International, the judges
on the Syrian court have no qualms in allowing confessions obtained
through torture. "Sometimes the lawyers aren't even allowed to set foot in
the courtroom, and sometimes the court bars them from reviewing the
files," says Ruth Jttner, a Middle East expert with Amnesty. Moreover, the
court's rulings cannot be appealed.

When the case against Zammar was first tried on Oct. 8, the presiding
judge read the charges out loud and promptly characterized Zammar as "a
friend of Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah," the Sept. 11 pilots who had
lived in Hamburg.

Zammar, whose weight has dropped from 145 kilograms (320 pounds) to about
90 kilograms (199 pounds) during his incarceration, stood up and argued in
his own defense. He told the judge that he did not deny having known
Jarrah and Atta, but that the two men had never told him about their grand
plan, and that he had been completely in the dark about the attacks on the
United States. He added that although he is not a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, he certainly supports the mujahedeen, God willing. The
hearing, which a United Nations observer happened to attend, ended
prematurely when Zammar angered the judges by condescendingly informing
them: "jihad is an Islamic duty."

An ethical dilemma for Berlin

For the German government the case, and the possibility of Zammar being
sentenced to death, means that it could have some explaining to do before
the investigative committee in Berlin. This is because Syrian authorities
were not the only ones who gathered the evidence against Zammar.

Indeed, some of the incriminating material came directly from the German
investigation. In preparation for a joint task force of German and Syrian
security officials, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), handed over
many of its records to the Syrians on Aug. 2, 2002.

The German investigators were convinced that their approach was justified,
especially since Zammar was still being prosecuted in Germany on charges
of supporting a terrorist organization. Providing the material was part of
the German officials' contribution to a planned trip to Syria.

3 months after the files were delivered, 5 agents from the BKA, the German
foreign intelligence agency (BND), and the domestic intelligence agency,
the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), were in fact
permitted to question the al-Qaida sympathizer in Damascus.

However, the German officials were not the only ones to analyze the
results. The visits, spread across 3 days, lasted exactly 15 hours and 20
minutes -- and were taped by the Syrians. One of the main charges in the
Syrian case against Zammar, his visits to al-Qaida training camps in
Afghanistan and Bosnia, is clearly supported by his responses to the
German agents' questions.

In the interviews, Zammar tells the Germans in detail how he had traveled
to Afghanistan five times between 1991 and 2000. Before the Germans
interrogated Zammar, the Syrians had complained that the prisoner was only
admitting things that they claimed were already known. But Zammar, who
apparently trusted the German delegation more than the Syrians, identified
other mujahedeen in photographs and incriminated various Syrian exiles.
Back in Berlin, the agents from the BKA, BND and BfV characterized the
results of their trip as "good to very good."

"The change in the group (of interrogators) created a new psychological
situation for him," the BND officials wrote in their secret interrogation
report, "which could provide new information from which the Syrian service
may also benefit." The domestic intelligence service, the BfV, came to a
similar conclusion in its own secret report: "The interrogations are
likely to have provided considerable new information for the Syrians. The
phrasing of the questions alone has given them a new understanding of the
case," because, as the report continued, the Syrians had "admitted that
they conducted their interrogations in the absence of significant
background information."

"A major stomachache"

But once the initial euphoria over the official trip to Damascus had
dissipated, BfV experts sensed just how problematic the process of what
August Hanning, the head of the BND intelligence service, called "giving
and taking" with Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, a regime despised
in the West, could be.

In March 2003, about 4 months after the German interrogation in Damascus,
the BKA asked BfV officials in Cologne for access to the file of
photographs in which Zammar had identified other Islamists. The request
was flatly denied. On March 10, 2003, a BKA official noted: "The BfV
considered it 'inopportune' to provide access to the photographs that were
shown to Zammar." A senior BKA official wrote his own, handwritten take on
the matter: "The BfV now has a major stomachache."

The domestic intelligence officials were worried "that the public would
become aware of the BfV's involvement in the Syria trip." For the same
reason, BfV officials opted not to take part in a planned meeting with
their counterparts at the BKA and BND, the purpose of which was to
exchange information. They had decided to end any involvement with a
country whose secret services were notorious for their unscrupulousness
and whose judicial system is known for its arbitrariness.

The nature of that relationship will now change in the Zammar case, a
reversal the Germans see as a way of making amends. The German Foreign
Ministry plans to send an observer to witness Zammar's new trial this
Sunday, and German diplomats have now obtained an attorney for the accused
terrorist sympathizer, even offering to pay his legal fees. Like Zammar,
the diplomats hope the judges will exercise leniency. Indeed, the Syrian
regime would be doing the German authorities a great favor if it commuted
the expected death sentence to a lengthy prison term, as it has done
before in similar cases.

(source: Spiegel Online)






INDIA:

Hight Court sets aside death penalty of murder accused


In a landmark judgment, a division bench of Bombay High Court at Goa has
set aside death sentence awarded to Soiru alias Sarvanand Gaonkar, an
accused in a murder case reported at Cuncolim on June 28, 2004, and
acquitted him of murder charge giving him benefit of doubt.

Mr Justice J N Patel and Mr Justice N A Britto gave this judgment on an
appeal filed by Gaonkar against sentence imposed on him by the additional
sessions judge, Margao. The death penalty was imposed on him for murdering
Rayu Faldesai, and his wife, Saraswati Faldessai.

The counsel for the appellant, Ms Shanti Fonseca earlier brought to the
notice of the court that the sessions court judgment suffered from serious
infirmities and the entire evidence was not clinching to nail the
appellant in the crime. She also pointed out that the judgment was based
on probabilities, which does not call for an order of conviction.

Ms Fonseca also pointed out before the High Court that the death sentence
could not be upheld because it did not fit into any of the guidelines as
set out by the Supreme Court in the rarest of rare cases. She also pointed
out that the sessions court had nowhere examined that the accused was
beyond reformation and that he was threat to society.

The High Court was also told by Ms Fonseca that statement of Dr Avinash
Poojari, who recorded confessional statement of the accused, could not be
considered as clinching evidence because he did not have knowledge of the
language of the accused.

Ms Fonseca also argued that none of the six brothers of the accused were
examined by the sessions court, nor were any of his 3 children. She also
pointed out that of the 54 persons whose statements were recorded only 21
were examined by the court.

(source: Navhind Times)