Seven men standing trial accused of recruiting militants to fight US forces in Iraq pleaded not guilty to all charges on Wednesday. The defendants told the military tribunal at the State Security Court (SSC) that they had no intention of fighting in Iraq and that âtheir confessions were extracted under duress.â The men, aged 23 to 33, are accused of recruiting militants in Jordan and sending them to Syria, where an individual identified as Abu Janna allegedly provided them with military training. According to the charge sheet, Abu Janna then helped the recruits infiltrate into Iraq âto fight American forces and Iraqi policemen.â
In a second terror-related trial at the SSC on Wednesday, five relatives of Jordanian men charged with plotting attacks against hotels, tourists and General Intelligence Department (GID) officers in 2005, testified under oath to seeing torture marks on the defendants' bodies. The defendants were identified by the prosecution as Osama Abu Hazeem, 23, Hatem Ensour, 20, Mohammad Arabiat, 24, and Yazan Haliq, 24. The fifth, Mohammad Qteishat, remains at large and will be tried in absentia. The men are charged with conspiracy to carry out terrorist attacks and possession of illegal explosives with illicit intent.
The prosecution alleges that in 1999 Haliq travelled to Syria to study and later befriended a 24-year-old Jordanian man by the name of Al Miqdad Dabbas in 2001. According to the charge sheet, Dabbas introduced Haliq to people who would help him cross into Iraq to fight. Dabbas was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison in March 2005 by the SSC for plotting subversive acts against Jordanian targets in Iraq with Jordanian fugitive Abu Mussab Zarqawi.
According to the charge sheet, Abu Hazeem travelled to Syria in 2003 and met with Dabbas, who provided him with the e-mail address of a person who would facilitate his entry into Iraq. Abu Hazeem returned to Jordan and asked Ensour and Arabiat to join them. Ensour then entered Iraq in mid-2003 and met with Qteishat. The two men then underwent weapons and explosives training, the charge sheet said. In September 2004, Abu Hazeem again travelled to Syria and received training in explosives, before returning to the Kingdom the same month with detonators, according to the prosecution. The charge sheet said that Haliq travelled to Lebanon in January 2005 where he received training in weapons and explosives before returning to the Kingdom. The group then decided to target three luxury hotels in the Kingdom frequented by tourists and GID officers, but the four men were arrested in February 2005 before carrying out the alleged plans, it said.