II. Juvenile Offenders on Death Row in Sanaa’s Central Prison

Human Rights Watch interviewed five young men on death row in the Sanaa Central Prison, the largest prison in Yemen’s capital city. The cases below represent all cases recorded by local civil society organizations and UNICEF of alleged juvenile offenders on death row in that facility who consented to be included in this report. Hind al-Barti, executed on December 3, 2012, was the sole juvenile offender who asked not to have her account included for fear that the victim’s family would campaign against a pardon, though she too agreed to be interviewed. In each case, Human Rights Watch explained the purpose of our research and the potential results of publication.

In each case, the individual interviewed provided information indicating that his age could have been under 18 at the time of his alleged crime, and that evidence to the contrary remains inconclusive. Two interviewees, Walid Haikal and Ibrahim al-Omaisy, gave credible accounts of beating and torture during their periods of pre-trial detention. None of the young men interviewed had access to a lawyer or other representation before their first trial sessions, in violation of Yemen’s obligation to provide appropriate counsel under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).[13]

Bashir Mohammed Ahmed Ali Al-Dihar

Bashir Al-Dihar was born in Bani Sa’ad district of Al-Mahwit governorate in 1994, according to both him and a birth registration document (not an official birth certificate) from his village.

When he was approximately 15 year old, on October 25, 2008, according to Bashir, he got into a fight with 3 older males who poked his jambiya, the traditional dagger Yemeni males wear in a belt around their waist. Bashir told Human Rights Watch:

[One of the guys] poked me in my arm and in my jambiya as I was leaving a fast-food restaurant, and they were entering the place. I asked “Why did you poke my jambiya?” Then we grabbed each other, and he slapped me. When we were fighting, I took out my jambiya to defend myself.I was moving my jambiya right and left if anyone approached me.… [One of them, Samy Saleh] raised his hand twice to hit me, and I tried to stab him in the hand, but he bowed a little and the jambiya hit him in the back of his shoulder. He fell on the ground. His friends stepped back. I put my jambiya back in its sheath, and I took him to the hospital along with his friends.[14]

At the hospital, where the victim, Samy Saleh, died, police arrested Bashir and took him to the local police station. He described what had happened, and the police brought him to the district police station. The police held him there for three days before transferring him to the juvenile section of Sanaa’s Central Prison. After 45 days there, he was taken to the prosecutor’s office.

Bashir told Human Rights Watch that the prosecutor asked him some questions but had already prepared a written paper that he told Bashir to sign this with his fingerprint. In trial court, he testified that while it was indeed his fingerprint on the written testimony produced, he had not provided the testimony.[15] The prosecutor charged Bashir with intentionally murdering Samy Saleh.Bashir claimed that he had acted in self-defense, and that he had not intended to kill the victim.

Bashir told Human Rights Watch that he was taken for a forensic examination where his hands were placed into “a device,” and as he remembers it, the doctor told him, “You did not yet start being 16 years old.”[16]

According to Bashir’s court records, at trial, a judge determined that he was in fact a child at the time of the murder.

However, part way through the trial, a different judge took over the proceedings. Bashir said:

The new judge, he only reviewed the file of the case in one trial session and … he said “I sentence him to death.” [My lawyer] brought the judge the forensic doctor’s report that said I was underage. And the judge said, “Even if he was 10 years old, then the punishment for a murderer is death.”[17]

The October 2010 trial court decision states that Bashir was 17 years old at the time of the decision, but affirms that the court sentenced him to death. The decision also orders him to pay 300,000 rials (US$1,400) compensation to the victim’s family. His case is currently under review by an appeals court.

Bashir started school when he was 8 years old, and was in the 7th grade at the time of his arrest. During his three years in prison, he finished the ninth grade and has started the first year of high school studies, concentrating on computers and English.

Reflecting on the attack four years ago, Bashir said:

I was young.… I feel regret for what I did.… We receive the most extreme punishment, and we were children. We should get the discipline and punishment appropriate for our age. This is what we want: that they look at us with a merciful eye.[18]

Qaid Youssef Omar Al-Khadamy

Qaid told Human Rights Watch that he was born in Raymah, Capital governorate in what he believes was 1989.[19] In 2004, when he says he was approximately 15 years old, he and a group of six men from his village were accused of intentionally murdering Fouad Mohsen Rabih by stabbing him in the back with a knife.[20] Qaid says that while one of the co-defendants in the case worked with Rabih’s brother, he had never met Rabih.[21]

According to Qaid’s trial transcript, a group of young men met the day before the murder and agreed to take revenge on Amr Mohsen Rabih, who had fired one of them from his job at a local restaurant. They went to the restaurant, and when Amr Mohsen Rabih left the building, they beat him with sticks. Fouad Mohsen Rabih, Amr’s brother who closely resembled him, was there at the same time, the transcript indicates. It states that the accused (Qaid) stabbed Fouad with a knife, and that a witness took Fouad to a military hospital where he died.

Qaid told Human Rights Watch that on July 31, 2004, while he was living in Sanaa, a group of men from his village took him to a fight:

They came and said, “Come with us, we have a problem.” I didn’t know that they were going to have a fight. I didn’t think. [But I went along] because they were from my same village. I feel regret about what happened.… I hadn’t expected this to happen, because I didn’t even know this person [Fouad Mohsen Rabih] who died. We didn’t have any previous problems. I just went along with people from my village. But me and that person, we didn’t have any personal problems between us.[22]

Tribal and other alternative forms of justice, including revenge attacks, are common in many areas of Yemen and often involve leaders summoning men and boys from a community to take up arms. Qaid’s court records indicate that his lawyer told the court he was examined by a forensic doctor in 2004, shortly after the crime, and that the doctor determined that Qaid was not older than 16. Qaid told Human Rights Watch that this doctor came to the juvenile section of the prison where he was being held.[23] The doctor x-rayed Qaid’s wrists, and according to Qaid, noted that he had not yet grown facial hair. According to the decision published by the appeals court, a second forensic doctor examined Qaid in 2006, 2 years after the crime, and determined that he had been between 18 and 19 years of age at the time of the crime in 2004.[24] The appeals court sentenced Qaid to death.[25]

Qaid says he was jailed for alleged murder when he was just 15 years old. He had finished eighth grade at the time of the crime, and was hoping to start in the ninth grade.[26]

Qaid’s death sentence was confirmed by the appeals court, and as of January 2013 his case had been pending for three years with the Supreme Court.

Mohammed Ahmed Sanhan

Mohammed comes from Tihama district of Hodeidah province. He was working as a street sweeper in Sanaa when on July 6, 2006, he stabbed a fellow guest at a wedding. He said that he was 17 years old at the time of the incident.[27]

Mohammed told Human Rights Watch that the victim, Abdelrahman Saleh Saleh al-Matri, began arguing with him and then started to slap and beat him. At that point, he said, he pulled out his jambiya:

He came to me. I was sitting down. He wanted to fight with me. He was older than me. Then he beat me. And I did not show patience, and I took out my jambiya and we fought.[28]

After stabbing al-Matri in the chest with his jambiya, Mohammed returned home. At 4 a.m. the next day he was taken by the police to their station, where he admitted to carrying out the stabbing. Al-Matrispent a month in the intensive care unit of Sanaa’s al-Thawra hospital but died in September 2005.[29]

Mohammed had his wrists and elbows x-rayed as part of a forensic examination of his age. The forensic report ordered by the public prosecution states that he was at least 19 years of age.[30] 

Ibrahim Fouad Mohsen al-Omaisy

Ibrahim Fouad Mohsen al-Omaisy says he was either 15 or 16 years old at the time of the murder for which he was accused. During an interview in March 2012, he told Human Rights Watch that he was 22 years old and had been in prison for 6 years.[31] Ibrahim lived in Sanaa with his family, and worked with his cousin driving a microbus.

He told Human Right Watch that about six years ago, three men hired him to drive them to a neighborhood in Sanaa where they wanted to purchase a car. One of the men had a revolver, not uncommon in Yemen. He said that the men got into a dispute with the seller over the price of the car, began fighting, and that a shot was fired at random, killing one of the men who had hired him. Ibrahim said he saw the men running away, so he left. He stayed at home for two days, but after learning that the police had arrested the two other men who had hired him, he went to a police station in Aden to describe what he had witnessed. He told Human Rights Watch that, “I thought I had nothing to fear, but [the police] insulted me and hit me. At this age, we try to make ourselves older so I had told them I was older than I was.” [32]

Ibrahim said that after he went to the station, the police took him into custody where they continued to abuse him:

They beat me with their hands, sometimes they would electro-shock me until I fell down. At that point if they had asked me, “Did you kill one-thousand?” I would have said, “Yes,” out of fear.[33]

Ibrahim added that he had no legal counsel during his interrogations, and that the first time he saw a lawyer was on his first trial date:

In the trial court, I got a sentence of 10 years and a fine of 5,500,000 rials [US $25,600]. There was a forensic report regarding my age, we produced my mom and dad’s wedding contract, which showed how long they had been married. They proved I was a juvenile, that’s why I got 10 years in the first court.

However, on appeal, Ibrahim was sentenced to the death penalty.                                  

Walid Hussein Haikal

Walid Haikal lived in Sanaa before his arrest. Though he is Yemeni, he was born in Saudi Arabia.[34] Walid told Human Rights Watch that he is now 26 years old, and that he has been in prison for 11 years—since age 15. On February 26, 2005, a trial court sentenced Walid to death, and his sentence was affirmed by all appeals courts. The president’s signature is all that remains for his sentence to be carried out.[35]

Walid told Human Rights Watch that he was arrested for allegedly killing Najib Saleh Jarallah al-Tha’wani, a man in his neighborhood:

I was in the seventh grade. There was a baltajiya [thug] in our neighborhood. He used to drink and fight and bother women. One day, he grabbed me by my lip, so I slapped him. Then, he sliced me with his jambiya on my cheek, and on my shoulder. I ran away and we filed a police report. This happened one week before he was killed.

Walid described his arrest just over a week later:

I was arrested on Friday night. I was lying with my head in my mother’s lap watching a film. The police came and knocked on the door, and said they wanted me only for five minutes. Of course, that was the last time I was home.

Walid told Human Rights Watch that he spent two months at Sanaa’s criminal investigations division, and that police beat and tortured him throughout his time there. He said:

They’d shackle us like a chicken, put metal between our legs and do falaka. This means beating you with a wooden stick on the bottom of your feet. Of course you’d want to confess anything. They also broke my fingers. I felt helpless, I would dream about them at night, and then they would come in the morning. I felt so scared, I thought my heart would burst out of my body. So of course I told them I did it. I told them a lie.

A forensic doctor’s report ordered by Walid’s lawyer and issued on September 1, 2001 states that Walid was 15 when the incident took place. However, in his court decision, the presiding judge argued that because the accused stated that he was 18 years old during his interrogation, the forensic report should not be used to establish his age. Haikal told Human Rights Watch that because he was born in Saudi Arabia, his lawyers have already spent between three and four years trying to obtain official documents proving his age.

Walid said he was a student in the seventh grade at the time of his alleged crime. In prison, he was able to finish secondary school coursework and begin university studies. “I studied on my own, and I would take the exams. I buy books myself,” he said. “There’s a school [in prison,] but people sentenced to the death penalty are not allowed to go.”[36]