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Sana'a: The American embassy on Sunday hailed the re-arrest and imprisonment of a Yemeni-American man wanted by the FBI in connection with terrorist acts in Yemen and the United States.
The embassy said Jaber Al Banna should be held accountable for his deeds.
"The arrest of Jaber Al Banna is an important first step. We have been waiting for the arrest of this wanted terrorist for a long time," a diplomatic source at the embassy told Gulf News after the Yemen State Security Appeal Court ordered that he be imprisoned immediately.
"Al Banna's arrest sends the right message, that terrorists will be held accountable for their crimes," added the source who asked not to be named.
Al Banna has been appealing a previous conviction in connection with the bombing of Yemeni oil facilities since the beginning of the year. He surprised everyone when he walked freely into the court room for the first session of his appeal in February.
Escorted by four bodyguards, all his relatives, he was free to come and go as he pleased at every subsequent session of the court. However, yesterday the judge ordered that he be imprisoned, at the request of the prosecutor.
The first court had sentenced him in absentia to ten years in prison for his involvement in bombing Yemeni oil installations east of the country in September 2006.
He had escaped from a Sana'a maximum security prison in February 2006 along with 22 other Al Qaida suspects. The United States had put a bounty of $5 million (Dh18,4 million) on his head for terrorist acts in the US.
He is an alleged member of the so-called Lackawanna Six, a group of young men from Buffalo, New York, who travelled to Afghanistan in the spring of 2001 to train in Al Qaida camps. In January 2004, under pressure from the US, Yemen arrested him.
The US has long been demanding the extradition of Al Banna and two other Yemenis, Jamal Al Badawi and Fahd Al Qusa, who were convicted in Yemeni courts for being involved in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 US sailors and wounded 39.
The Yemeni government has refused to hand them over to Washington.
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