A Yemeni court sentenced to death an Islamist imam who confessed to murdering a senior opposition leader and jailed six accomplices.
Judge Abdul Rahman Jahhaf, presiding at the Sanaa lower court, announced Sunday that Ali Ahmed Jarallah would be "executed by firing squad."
The 32-year-old cleric confessed in court in July that he had acted alone in fatally shooting Jarallah Omar, deputy leader of the opposition Yemeni Socialist Party (YSP), at a party conference in Sanaa last December.
However six other men, accused of belonging to an armed gang Jarallah set up to carry out murders of socialists, Nasserists, and Muslims converted to Christianity were given jail sentences of between three and 10 years.
One of them, Abed Abdul Razzak Kamel, is already on death row after being found guilty in May of murdering three American missionaries on December 30 in southern Yemen.
Another seven Yemenis accused of belonging to the gang were however acquitted.
The prosecutor, Said al-Aqel, had demanded the death penalty for Jarallah, a former member of Yemen's Islamist Al-Islah Party who quit the party shortly before the killing, complaining it had gone soft on Westerners and minority Islamic sects.
"Jarallah used the Msik mosque in Sanaa, where he was the imam to recruit and train youngsters to carry out attacks and sow sedition throughout the country," the judge told the court.
" Jarallah had prepared and distributed 1,553 video cassette recordings of lectures about a dozen subjects," inciting violence, he added.
Defending lawyers said Jarallah and the six others would appeal against their sentences.
YSP politburo member Mohamed al-Makhlafi, a lawyer in charge of the case for several opposition parties, told AFP: "This verdict is not enough to wipe out terrorism in Yemen."
The opposition would also appeal against the sentences, he said.
Makhlafi stressed "the need to unveil the other people involved in this affair," referring to those who he believed ordered the murder.
He said the case should be "dealt with as a national security issue and not just a criminal affair."
Shortly after the murder, an interior ministry official, quoted by the official SABA news agency, said the killer was "one of the extremist elements of Al-Islah, who had been arrested by the security services in the past for inciting violence against the state before being freed after the leadership of the party intervened."
Al-Islah strongly condemned the murder as "a criminal act perpetrated against democracy."
The YSP, now in opposition as is Al-Islah, governed southern Yemen before it was unified with the north in May 1990.
The killing came amid an upsurge in terrorist and political violence in Yemen which led President Ali Abdullah Saleh to promote a code of honour among political parties in a bid to protect democracy from violence.
Leading parties adopted the code before legislative elections in April. The trial opened April 20.