AMMAN, Jordan, April 2 (UPI) -- Jordan's state security court once again convicted a group of suspected terrorists allegedly linked to al-Qaida, sentencing them 15 years to life.
Since the late 1990s, Jordan's security courts have tried dozens of suspected terror cases involving al-Qaida. Even its leader, Osama bin Laden, had been sentenced to death before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington on charges of masterminding and financing attacks in the kingdom from Afghanistan.
Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who headed al-Qaida in Iraq, had also been sentenced to death in a number of terror-related cases, but he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq last year.
The intensity of the terror trials has increased in the past few years, most of them being plots before being carried out. The number of trials has also surged since the November 2005 suicide bombings that targeted three major hotels in the Jordanian capital, killing 60 people and injuring 100 others.
On Monday the military court convicted a group of Arab men from Iraq, Libya and Saudi Arabia and acquitted one. The Jordanian authorities revealed the alleged plot in April last year after the main defendant, Libyan Mohammad Saeed al-Dersi, "confessed" on state-owned Jordan Television he was recruited by al-Qaida Saudi national Turki Nasser. Nasser was among those sentenced to life in absentia.
According to the charge sheet, the Libyan defendant was tasked by Nasser to bomb Amman's Queen Alia International Airport and other sites used by foreign tourists, such as hotel resorts on the shores of the Dead Sea.
