Abu Qatada verdict set for June 26 as defence rests

AMMAN — The State Security Court (SSC) is set to issue its final verdict in the high-profile Abu Qatada terror trial on June 26 after the hard-line cleric’s defence team issued its final statements on Sunday.

In a brief session on Sunday, the lawyers for Mahmoud Othman, known as Abu Qatada, issued their closing arguments in twin terror cases that may land the Bethlehem-born cleric life in prison with hard labour.

In their closing statements, defence attorneys Ghazi Thneibat and Hussein Mubaideen implored the court to examine alleged discrepancies between evidence presented in Othman’s trial and various statements and testimonies provided in previous trials and deportation hearings in the UK and the European Human Rights Court. 

The defence team dismissed evidence provided by the military court — the bulk of which relied upon alleged recorded conversations between Othman and fellow Salafists Abdul Nasser Al Khamaiseh and Mohammad Sawan — as “flimsy”.

The lawyers also attacked the credibility of Khamaiseh, Othman’s co-defendant in the “reform and challenge” terror trial who was released in 2011 on a general pardon and is believed to be currently serving alongside Islamist militias in Syria. 

“It was in Khamaiseh’s interest to incriminate our client — everything he said before the court and elsewhere should be treated as suspect if not thrown out as evidence,” Thneibat told The Jordan Times. 

Throughout the six-month trial, Othman’s defence team focused their efforts on discrediting hours of taped phone conversations between Othman and Salafists, claiming that Abu Qatada had been “baited” by Jordanian intelligence services into incriminating himself in terror plots of which he had no prior knowledge. 

Othman had previously denied any ties to Khamaiseh or Sawan, with whom the cleric is accused of conspiring to carry out attacks targeting Western and local security targets in Amman, according to the charge sheet. 

In the “reform and challenge” case, the 51-year-old cleric is charged with masterminding Al Qaeda-inspired attacks on a host of sites across the capital in the late 1990s, while in the “Millennium bombing” plot, he and other hard-line Islamists are charged with attempting to bomb the American School in west Amman.

In 2013, Jordan and the UK inked a prisoner swap agreement paving the way for Othman’s deportation to the Kingdom in July last year.